Deena Metzger's Blog, page 5
January 5, 2019
Extinction Illness: Grave Affliction and Possibility Featured Essay on Tikkun by Deena Metzger
“Everyone says climate is the most important issue of all, and yet they just carry on as before. I don’t understand that. Because if the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t. We have to change.”
– Greta Thunberg, 15-year-old climate activist, self-identified as autistic, speaking at the UN Climate Summit in Poland, December, 2018.
The insight came swiftly, undeniable and overwhelming, like the fire storm that devoured Paradise. Instant and devastating. The impact and understanding immediate.
I had been reeling from the news of the last years regarding climate disruption, wars, famine, hate crimes, the desperation of migrants and refugees, and the incomprehensible chaos and brutishness of our current president – as have we all – and also from a series of events which I had met individually and, without realizing it, had compartmentalized in order to respond from an open an unimpeded heart.
But coming home after many days away to phone messages from two different women who could not speak coherently because they had broken into sobs, I was alerted to the grief that they were carrying for all of us which could not be contained in a personal story. I knew then these are not merely difficult times. And even this might not have been sufficient to alert me to the extremity of the critical shift in our weather, external and internal, had not another message been left from a friend whose daughter had just been killed by the Thousand Oaks shooter and another from a relative on her way to the Pittsburgh synagogue where there had just been a massacre.
On Friday November 13, 2015, I had stayed up all night emailing with a friend in Paris as she hid in her apartment after the bombings which had just occurred in her neighborhood. And in the last year, I had been advising several friends and colleagues who are offering trauma counseling and community support to the Parkland survivors and their families as well as to students and faculty in Pine Ridge who were trying to meet a rash of suicides and attempted suicides in teenagers and younger children. There were also three deaths of young people close to me in the last month. A startling number of friends and acquaintances, formerly competent and active people, have been unable to function for long periods of time due to disabling depression, anxiety, and despair; I do not know if they will recover. Two members of our small, well-educated and trained community are homeless, unable to find work or permanent housing with friends or relatives. An alarming percentage of friends’ children are suffering from addiction, schizophrenia, depression, and are in danger of committing suicide. Two women will meet with me this week to explore writing about living with wary children (plural) suffering mental illness while another friend called to ask for prayers for yet another young man incarcerated in a mental hospital. One of our Daré (community healing circles) members reports monthly on the condition of two sons in and out of mental hospitals over the last ten years. There has been more mental illness and addiction in my extended family than I had ever conceived possible when I was young and more children in my kinship network suffering from conditions that range between high functioning Asperger’s syndrome and extreme autism requiring full time care.
At night, I dream the anguished cries of polar bears, grizzlies, fur seals, whales, wolves, elephants, giraffes, lions, whose habitats are overrun, toxic and gravely dangerous, who cannot live a moment without fear of the next action by the ravenous two-leggeds who hunt or gawk, who pollute, destroy, and dominate. Though I had to evacuate for a week because of the firestorm threat to Topanga, my discomfort did not compare to the death in the Woolsey fire of two of our very, very few mountain lions when 85% of the wild mountain park that was their territory burned. Meanwhile, the rangers cautioned us not to put out water or food because “the animals are resourceful” even though there is no water to be found in this drought which caused the fires. Simultaneously, the Camp Fire changed everything as people were vaporized or cremated in a fire that was hotter than any natural fire we have known. A filmmaker friend who traveled to Chico and Paradise found people gathering – Climate Uprising – to face the climate crisis even while sifting through the ashes for signs of their loved ones and trying to imagine how to survive and rebuild. The probability that there was and may continue to be a release of radiation from the toxic and radioactive super site at the old Rocketdyne lab in Simi Valley is democratically experienced by all beings which means the remaining mountain lions and all the flora and fauna and human beings, myself, my children, my friends included within a hundred miles.
What was my realization? Here it is:
We are all going extinct.
The animals know this and now all humans know this as well. Sensing the imminent death of all species, the cellular understanding of our common fate is making us ill. Our nervous and physical systems cannot bear this terrible knowledge. The growing understanding of the reality of the human caused 6th Extinction is resulting in Extinction Illness.
Contemplating the extent and pervasiveness of despair and violence across the globe, the increasing aberrance of human and non-human behavior, I see that all humans and non-humans know this, all human people and all beings, animals, trees, birds, insects, fish, know this. And all of us are being driven to some form of madness, pain, or dysfunction. For the animals, Bear, Wolf, Elephant, Whale this results in unavoidable and unmediated terror. We humans know, with or without awareness, that we are responsible. And so, we, entirely crazed, become a species that commits ecocide even as we die of it. The different signs and symptoms are ubiquitous and no one is escaping it.
We know we are going extinct. We know this consciously and/or unconsciously. Each person on the planet knows this. Extinction is upon us and no one is immune to it. All beings sense our/their imminent death. Not only their individual deaths, but far worse, the death of their species. An unbearable thought. And beyond that, the death of all species ….
My father, writer Arnold Posy, feared for the death of his people. He wrote in Yiddish and mourned its death and everything that would mean, the end of a culture which was held together for hundreds of years by language. I lived every day with his grief as the truth of the Holocaust descended upon him. He had escaped the Czarist army and made his way to England, because he knew how Jews fared when conscripted and also, he was not a man who could take up a gun. His brother came to the foot of his bed one night, his uniform torn and stained with mud, his head bandaged and bloody, his body broken and exuding the patina of death. “Look, Aria, what the Cossacks have done to me,” the ghost said and disappeared. Weeks later, a letter came to London detailing his death in the army. My father knew that had he not escaped, he would also have died by fragging but he could not bear the reality that his family of twelve children and numerous aunts, uncles, cousins, had perished in mass graves, save him, the youngest, and his sister the oldest, twenty years between them.
We lived with these deaths though my father’s personal sorrow was mostly silenced by the greater wail of the Holocaust. In 1945, at age 9, I learned of the atom bomb and sensed that I would also mourn other incomprehensible tragedies. When my father died in 1987 when I was fifty, I knew that I would be carrying not the death of a people but the death of all peoples, human and non-human alike, the death of the planet, of Earth, of the future, of all life.
It is possible that Extinction Illness is the root of all contemporary mental, physical, and spiritual diseases. Extinction Illness, the essential cellular knowledge and terror that one’s life, one’s people’s lives, all life is threatened, that lineage is disappearing, that we, all, may well become extinct within a very short period of time, that the future will be eradicated.
The fire of knowing sweeps down upon us like a tornado and there is no place to run. There is no escape. And worse, we do not get to live our ordinary lives until the moment of Extinction. Much suffering is inevitable before our demise in whichever way it will come to any one of us.
An inevitable prelude arises: Extinction illness – our bodies, minds, souls reeling with the terrible reality of what we have done, are doing. Extinction is our fault.
Whether or not we ‘believe’ the scientists who say climate change is Anthropocene Climate Disruption, meaning we are the cause, we know extinction and our role in it, consciously and unconsciously. Even those who don’t consciously know or accept the reality of the 6th Extinction or Climate Change or Disruption or recognize the consequences of the bleaching of the barrier reefs, the glaciers and poles melting, the acidification of the oceans, the extreme weather shifts, deadly floods, year-long and increasingly intense fire seasons, wind tornadoes and fire tornadoes, the insect apocalypse, the collapse of fisheries, deforestation, desertification and 17,000 species threatened at this time, they know. The unconscious knows. The soul knows. The connected life system knows even if the individual isn’t consciously aware. He/she/they were born into the network of all life and Life knows too. As Ubuntu teaches, “I am because you are,” which now we must rephrase: I will not be because you will not be. I will not be if you will not be.
Extinction illness. A world condition and a world affliction. Perhaps this systemic affliction is at the root of all our current global plagues, diseases, and illnesses.
As I write this to you, my heart beat is irregular and pounding. I know the reality of all of this in my body. We each know this differently. I know it through hartzveitig– the pain of extreme grief and despair, the anguish of the broken heart. There is no physical medical cause for my body’s agitation; there is only this physical manifestation of hartzveitig. It could be any symptom. It could be any of the conditions or situations mentioned in the beginning of this desperate exhortation to sanity and change. It could be a heart attack, intractable depression, inconsolable grief, addictions of every sort, splitting, compulsions, denial, extreme greed and territoriality, violent rages, derangement, uncontrollable aggression, murder, urges to suicide, even, paradoxically, paralleling the host of auto-immune responses, deliberate acts of ecocide. It could be any of these arbitrary or happenstance physical or mental manifestations of the same illness which we mistake for symptoms and treat uselessly, as we often treat symptoms without seeking the essential core.
As there is no pharmaceutical for Extinction, there is none for Extinction Illness. There is no anti-biotic, no anti-depressant or anti-psychotic, no sedative, no bone marrow transplant, no chemotherapy, rodenticide, no pesticide, no radiation therapy. To the contrary, this list makes it clear that these conventional medicinals are the poisons which accelerate the condition. There is no personal healing for these conditions and treating or focusing on the symptoms is counter-productive and exacerbates our common jeopardy.
Here we are. We are all suffering a life-threatening illness for which there is no discoverable cure. How shall we meet it?
For a period of time, we may be able to bear the symptoms or pretend that they are part of the natural order of disease to be treated conventionally. Over time, this blind recourse will be seen to be self-serving and futile. Like any being with a life-threatening illness, we suffer it and respond in a thousand different ways before we ultimately succumb.
However, in rare cases we can transform our fate through deep listening to what the body and soul need to reverse the death process and enter life. Healing our lives and preparing for good deaths is the same action. Can we heal ourselves, our planet? Can we desist from doing so much harm? There is no medicine, no medical procedure that will heal Extinction except ….
The only healing for Extinction, and so Extinction IIlness, as they are entirely intertwined, is stopping Extinction.
***
When one is suffering a life-threatening illness, one is called to look beyond the physical manifestation to see the root cause and determine what one can do to change one’s life and, hopefully, extend, even save it. As it happens, the particular symptoms we have, the particular affliction, often point the way to the healing action we are to take. This implies that each of us suffering distinctly gets to add exactly what is needed to the complex whole. Though this way of proceeding is not part of conventional western medicine, it is still a deep response among many people who search to find meaning and purpose in a healing path. Cure is instant but healing is a life-long practice.
Learning I had cancer at age forty, I understood I had to change my life in every way to create health. I had to leave a relatively secure teaching life for the unknown, risking my income, leaving friends, community, comfort and a four-bedroom house and pool in the suburbs to live in Topanga, a rural canyon in California in a two-room broken down cottage at the end of a dirt road to which I had to bring water and other basic amenities. My value system was undergoing an extreme reset. It was excruciatingly difficult to strip away socialization, conventional assumptions about the good life and everyone’s advice to remain safe, but I knew my life depended on the shift. Struggling and afraid, I turned inward to create a relationship with the natural world. Cancer striking at age forty brought a dark time, but the activity of healing brought light. Not everyone can leave our urban centers, but we can transform them so that we are all living less desperate and disconnected lives. We can find the necessary ways to restore and co-exist in different degrees with the wild everywhere. However, to really live once again with the natural world and the wild on their own terms means to strip away almost everything and begin again. And only when we do so will we be in the right mind to begin to contemplate what is next and how to proceed on behalf of a future for all beings, including ourselves.
In the mid-seventies, a man suffering cancer said to me, “Cancer is the answer.” He had changed his life drastically from a deadly regime to life-giving ways that entirely invigorated him and it seemed was also going to extend his life significantly.
And so, given that we are all suffering this life-threatening condition which manifests in the deterioration of the natural world and in concomitant individual, social, political, global catastrophes, and given that a multitude of climate scientists, specialists of Earth medicine, asserted on October 7, 2018, through the release of a UN climate assessment report that we have only twelve years to lower the carbon level or all life as we know it is done for – all life – then we have less than twelve years to reverse this diagnosis. How, then, shall we live to promote health? How will we change our lives drastically enough to save Life itself?
Well, we will have to love life, won’t we? We will have to love life, the natural world, value beauty and the wild nature above all else, won’t we?
And here’s the rub: in order to save our lives, we have to save everyone’s life, human and non-human, because Extinction Illness tells us that we cannot survive alone as the life force and life cycles depend absolutely on diversity and the abundance of all the life forms.
In modern days, when a plague or virus affects a large population or is highly contagious and uncontrollable, all health and medical resources are directed toward healing and containment. But in this instance, medical, psychological, and health personnel have not considered it their duty, let alone their primary responsibility to make the diagnosis and find the causes of Extinction and Extinction Illness in our lives and respond accordingly. It is urgent that we do so. The ultimate meanings of “Physician heal thyself,” coupled with, “First do no harm.”
So much more can and must be said and explored about this, but first we must take in the reality of the illness, its multiple forms and manifestations, the ways it masks ordinary diseases, and the truth that there are no easy cures or even opiates to dull the pain. First, we must recognize our condition and then admit we have caused this crisis, that we continue to create it. We are responsible. It is a consequence of our willful and/or oblivious initiation of an auto-immune disease, simultaneously homicide and ecocide.
Extinction Illness: an affliction and an alert. In 1977, cancer alerted me to Imperialism and its affects: a rogue cell invades a territory, reproduces itself without assuming any useful functions to sustain the whole, uses up all the available resources and pollutes the site until everything, itself included, dies. I had to know it in my body in order to understand its grave harm in the world. Extinction Illness alerts us to the dire effects of our predatory nature. Extinction Illness is an iconic auto-immune disease: the species attacks itself and all life is threatened.
But deep self-scrutiny of the illness and its causes can reveal, as is the case, again, with other life-threatening illnesses, which paths lead to healing and the restoration of vitality. There are old medicines and medicine ways that can be revived. Indigenous peoples whose ways and culture are not responsible for this tragedy, though they suffer it, know something of the values, approaches, lived ways that can mitigate what is otherwise our grim fate. Deep immersion in and attention to and unconditional love of the natural world are necessary pathways. There are other ways we can find but none will be effective unless we willingly, ruthlessly and essentially change our lives.
The only healing for Extinction Illness is changing our lives to stop Extinction.
The only healing for Extinction Illness is changing our lives to stop Extinction.
Read the essay at Tikkun.org
November 29, 2018
The Eulogy that Deena offered at the Memorial for Noel Sparks killed by the Thousand Oaks Shooter
From Noel’s FB page September 9, 2017:-
Sometimes you don’t know the value of something until it becomes a memory – Dr Suess
“I knew also, that for us, the older generation, Noel was hope. When we think of how, despite our efforts, we have failed the time, we think of young people like Noel as hope for the future.”
I knew Noel from approximately age 8 to 14. We met through poetry and music. I was reading my poetry with Jami Sieber, cellist and Wendy Anderson, her mother, and Noel were in attendance. They followed Jami’s music so closely I can only guess that Jami inspired Noel’s love of the cello. In that way, I think my writing inspired this gifted young woman as well. Our souls found each other, Jami, Wendy, Noel and I. When Noel was about twelve or thirteen, she attended a week-long writing retreat I offered for advanced writers, many already published. She held her own and helped out in the kitchen. All of it part of her home schooling, which Wendy pursued with the utmost seriousness and devotion. She home schooled Noel because she knew how remarkable Noel was and had a sacred responsibility to provide the fullest most relevant education possible.
When he confirmed that I would be speaking today, Pastor Curtis Johnson asked me to craft a message of hope. I took in his request deeply and have been contemplating the nature of hope, how it arises and guides us. I knew given these terrible circumstances and the grief and violence of these dark years like no other on the face of the earth since the beginning of time, that I had to offer real hope, not rhetoric or exhortation, but hope that would be palpable and sustaining for everyone, myself included.
I knew also, that for us, the older generation, Noel was hope. When we think of how, despite our efforts, we have failed the time, we think of young people like Noel as hope for the future.
When we read the current dire IPCC report, the International Panel on Climate Change, and see how grievously we have attacked the earth, or when we take in the tragedy of the fires still burning here and in the North, that are of our doing, we think of Noel who loved the Earth passionately, as someone who already carried and so would initiate the changes we must make in order for life to survive.
A simple story to set the context. Wendy attended a workshop I offered in Topanga. We spent a long time in silence on the land meeting the spirit of the natural world. At the end, Wendy appeared with a rack of deer antlers on her head. So many of us had walked the land over and over again for years, but no one of us had seen the weathered antlers. It had had to be Wendy. Wendy is of the natural world. The earth raised her in her great wisdom. And Wendy, in turn, allowed the earth to raise Noel so that she would grow up wise and compassionate, an advocate for the Earth that would give us hope.
When we, the older generation, think of all the wars we wage, the viciousness of the technology, the violence, alienation, the enormous suffering that combatants and non-combatants endure, the fact that the wars never end and come home to us again and again as they did on November 7th, we think of Noel as someone who knew and lived peace in every cell of her being. Because Noel was intuitively, instinctively, spiritually, even stubbornly, devoted to peace, insisting on peaceful and heartful solutions to conflict, we had hope that she would set right what we failed to do.
When we think of all the Ian David Longs who went to war and suffered such moral injury that drives one mad, and when we admit that we failed to stop these wars, failed to provide healing, then we had hope that Noel would know how to meet his ravaged soul, that she would have known to take such a one to the forest, to the desert, to rock climb, to be washed clean in the sea, to the healing of the natural world, that she would have listened to his unspeakable story, brought comfort, helped him make amends and heal before… We had hope in Noel as a healer.
And when we watch everything of value torn apart by injustice and hate, we had faith that Noel had the fierce and devoted love that could meet such circumstances and those who suffered them and could bring the peace that only a true, determined, intelligent, courageous, undaunted, entirely authentic love can bring.
And so now that she is gone, what hope?
I reframe here a poem I wrote some years ago:
When a great body and soul
is broken by catastrophe
We take the pieces into ourselves
And we are made whole thereby.
We have all heard who Noel was, what she lived by, what she embodied, the true, pure and spiritual nature of her being.
Let us take a moment of silence, and take what we know of her deep. Deep into ourselves. Let us breathe in the parts of her that are most important to each of us – whether it be
her profound love and participation in beauty, music, dance, art, words,
her indomitable healing spirit,
her love and devotion to the natural world and all beings,
her insistence upon justice,
her lived conviction that violence is unnecessary and peace is necessary
and possible
and her loving nature, her determination to meet every situation in real
time with love, courageously and passionately.
Take these in. Breathe her spirit into you. Let it inscribe itself in you.
What is hope?
Noel was hope.
And now she is in you, is of us.
She is not gone, she is dispersed within us.
And so hope?
You are hope.
You are now the hope that will bring peace and restore life to this ravaged planet.
Bless you all.
September 12, 2018
The Lost Etiquette: Sharon English Converses with Deena Metzger at Dark Mountain Project
Recently I was interviewed by Sharon English. The interview I have posted below can be found at The Dark Mountain Project.
I met Deena Metzger in 2014 when she visited Canada to teach a weekend workshop on story and healing. As a teacher and writer myself, deeply interested in how writers can address ecological and social crisis, the workshop theme intrigued me. Deena’s biography described her as “a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman” who has been devoted to “investigating Story as a form of knowing and healing.” Excitingly, her notion of ‘healing’ seemed radically extended to include “life-threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration.” Still, I knew nothing of the extraordinary individual awaiting me, with whom I’ve been fortunate to continue learning and seeking since.
“Who do we have to become to find the forms and sacred language with which to meet these times?” Deena’s life is certainly one possible answer to her own question. Spanning many decades, her work interweaves activism, art and community building with a rare courage to cross frontiers such as the reality of animal intelligence and agency, and the reality of spirit. Her book The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them was published in one volume in 1977 with Tree, one of the first books written about breast cancer. The book coincided with the printing of the exuberant post-mastectomy photograph of Deena, called “Tree” or “Warrior”, which has been shared worldwide. It took the third publisher, North Atlantic Press, to have the courage when reissuing Tree to print the poster image on the cover. Since writing Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing (2002), which came out of a decade’s work with animals and Indigenous medicine, Deena has held ReVisioning Medicine gatherings for those trained in Western medicine who long to be healers too and also Daré, a monthly gathering for the community at her home in Topanga, California, and a practice that has spread to other North American cities.
Drawing on myth, Indigenous and other wisdom traditions that have been lifetime pre-occupations, Deena has articulated a vision of why and how we must create a culture that does no harm, called the . She’s recently been touring her new novel, A Rain of Night Birds (2017), which addresses ecological crisis and the necessity of bridging the disparity between Indigenous and Western mind. I caught up with her on Skype in August, 2017.
Sharon English: Let’s start with the invitation which Dark Mountain made with Issue 12, which led us to this conversation: an invitation to reflect on our experience of the sacred in a time of unravelling and how that experience might call our contemporary assumptions into question.
Deena Metzger: I think the essential questions are: How is the sacred implicit in whatever possibilities exist for this time? How can our own experiences of the sacred inform our activism? I think you know that, for me, the only hope that I really see for a future for the planet and all life is following the direction and the guidance of the sacred, being aware of its presence.
SE: Yes, yet the sacred and spirit have had a very bad rap. On the one hand, because religion has been put into the service of the dominator culture, many people associate the spiritual with something oppressive or at least conforming. On the other hand, New Age spirituality seems too bound up in the individual – ‘what’s sacred to you’ – to be relevant in a time of unravelling.
DM: I would prefer not to go there. Because if we go there, we’re focusing on the human, when what we’re called to do is to listen and respond to the sacred. How you and I have experienced the sacred, without reference to how it has not been experienced, feels very important to me. What feels essential is speaking about the sacred, and the awareness that this is what Indigenous people have always known and what has sustained them. My interest is in returning to the old wisdom and bringing it back so that the planet can be saved.
Terrence Green, one of the protagonists in A Rain of Night Birds, is clear about this as he, a climatologist, faces the reality of the planet’s unravelling. A mixed blood man, he became Chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Studies, but his grief awakens the Native teachings transmitted to him by his grandfather. This is 2007. It’s the time of the International Panel on Climate Change. In this stunning report, he finds two small references to TEK: traditional ecological knowledge. Within thousands of pages of scientific data and analysis, he finds two small references, four or five sentences. This both moves and grieves him. His response is to go to the Mountain where his grandfather took him as a child to teach him about the old ways. As he prays to the Mountain and apologises for having left the red path – even though he left it for reasons that were theoretically on behalf of his people, learning what Westerners were doing so that he could help Native people adjust to the way we are living – he realises exactly how much he betrayed his soul for entering into Western living:
He was speaking aloud, but he didn’t know to whom he was speaking, or whether he was speaking, or in a dream of speaking, or in a spirit realm to which he had been transported by what appeared to be injury, but was also something else. [The injury is the Earth’s injury and his own injury.] There was a thousand different ways he’d accepted that spirits are real although Western mind was a miasma of denial that entered through the cracks and fissures of his being, like water seeping through rock, undermining the original structure of all things. (174)
I think that’s all that needs to be said: Western mind IS a miasma of denial that undermines the true nature of the world. So then, how can we make our way back? How do we accept Spirit as reality, not illusion? And what is Spirit saying to us?
You’ve recently had a remarkable dream that is teaching you/us a lost etiquette. I’ve also had such dreams. They come from Spirit. This novel was given to me by Spirit. These gifts are our “evidence”. They offer guidance. They teach us what is important to bring forth. When I heard your dream, I knew that you were being guided and were dreaming in the old ways, which means not for you personally or psychologically, but as a teaching for all of us.
SE: I’ll retell it now for readers. The dream came early this summer:
I’m attending a council of Indigenous people held inside an orca. First, I’m shown that the orca has two spaces: a small opening in its body that has something to do with healing, like a healing chamber, and also a larger opening like two skin flaps that part and lead into a sizable circular chamber, like a tent, with a floor and walls of black and white orca skin. I enter.
Inside, a group of Indigenous people are sitting in a circle around a simple altar of animal skin with objects placed on it. An elder sits on the far side. I sit down in the circle, directly across from the elder. I’m the only non-Indigenous person. It occurs to me that I’m not sitting in the right place, that maybe I shouldn’t be facing the elder so directly, so I change places in the circle so I’m more to the side. I feel like I’m being invited here for the first time and am learning the protocol.
One of the biggest teachings for me, in opening to the sacred and spirit, has been coming to understand dreams as language or communication that aren’t only about the isolated individual. That dreams can hold meaning for the community, and come through us, not only from our own psyches.
The great danger at the core of Western thinking is our belief that we are the world, the centre of things. So when we respond to the crises in our world we assume it’s up to us to figure them all out – the very kind of self-involved thinking that got us here. We have no sense of living in a field of relationships with other creatures who possess their own traditions, wisdom, consciousness and agency. That when it comes to our world crises, everybody, human and nonhuman, needs to be at the table. At this point it’s we who need to be guided by whales and spirit, or Spirit-as-Whales.
DM: The dream is about more than being guided by Whales. In the dream, you enter into the Whale, and the council is taking place inside the Whale. In other words, in the dream, Whale consciousness is the sacred world we enter. That’s the territory in which this Indigenous council is taking place. As the Whales or other beings live in our consciousness, we are now living within the Whales’ consciousness.
Furthermore, you are aware that you don’t know how to deport yourself in this setting. As more of us experience the presence of the sacred, we have to figure out the protocol, the etiquette for approaching this realm and those within it. We have to re-learn what our Indigenous ancestors knew and also discover how to proceed at this time in history. Here the sacred is within the body-mind of the great ones, in this case, Whale. We have to go into the internal place where the field exists, the consciousness we need. In a sense like the story of Jonah – except we hope to keep living there, not leave.
When a dream like this comes as a teaching for the community, it’s not going to be an easy dream to understand. We’re going to have to sit with what it means. You and I may not know all its dimensions as we’re speaking to each other, so we carry it for as long as necessary, bringing it to others who might help to reveal its profound mystery. We do this because we understand that such dreams can be the source of wisdom. In the old, old days, no matter which Indigenous culture one was part of, if there was something going on that was really difficult or terrible, one would ask for a dream. The community of elders would gather and hope that a dream would come, or someone would come and say they’d had a dream, and people would gather to listen to it. This happened with your dream: you responded to it in the old, old ways by bringing it to me. We talked about what it might mean, and then I suggested that you take this dream to the community. And you did. Those you’ve shared it with have pondered it with you. We are not asking the personal meaning of the dream, ‘What is this dream for your life?’ Rather we’re considering, ‘What is this dream telling us?’
I had an experience this weekend that feels related: I went Whales watching in the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California. There were so many Whales, such a profusion of wildlife, that the guides on the boat were astonished. Again and again they marvelled that they had never seen anything like it. I’ve been speaking with friends who live along the coast who’ve also been seeing a remarkable profusion of Whales this summer. Stan Rushworth, a Native novelist, author of the remarkable book Going to Water, speaks of the surprising occurrences of Whales coming in close to the shore and breaching over and over when he is walking on the beach. Cynthia Travis, who founded and directs the grassroots peace-building NGO in Liberia, everyday gandhis, and who lives overlooking the sea in Ft. Bragg, CA, has also been startled by the profusion of Whales.
Cynthia was on the Whales watching boat with me as was Cheryl Potts, with whom I share my land in Topanga. Cynthia and I have travelled to Africa to many times. At the moment when we found ourselves among several different kinds of Whales, and kinds of Dolphins and Sea Lions, Cynthia wondered if the Whales were coming to us deliberately in the way that the Elephants came to us. So maybe your dream isn’t accidental, but part of a consciousness being held by Whales that’s alerting us humans to what’s happening on the planet – and to the fact that there’s a protocol required. That’s the sacred knowledge being transmitted: first, that we’re within Whales’ consciousness, and second, that there’s an etiquette we have to learn.
SE: In Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, he notes how various thinkers have begun to use the word uncanny in relation to macro ecological events because, he says, they’re recognising what we’ve long turned away from: “the presence and proximity of the nonhuman interlocutors” (30). Having to learn the etiquette for approaching the nonhuman and the sacred – that’s such a different teaching than this idea that ecological events are uncanny, a concept that suggests the world of the nonhuman is unsettling, inexplicable, and even creepy. There’s a great humility required to accept that we’re being called to learn, not to figure things out, but to learn or recover the ways of relationship to the sacred.
DM: It’s important what you said, “not to figure it out”. We don’t have the capacity to figure it out, and that’s humbling. We learn some from the old, old ways: we learn things about making offerings, about meeting the nonhuman and the sacred with profound respect and honour, and then, we listen deeply to the teachings that come. So your dream was the thing-in-itself and also about it: you went into the sacred and were taught how to approach the sacred.
SE: Yes. In approaching the sacred, council seems integral, as was pointed out in the dream. And your process, whether in Daré or ReVisioning Medicine or writing workshops, is to teach by holding council. Can we talk about what council is and why it’s part of our relationship to the sacred?
DM: It goes back to what you said, ‘It’s not about us figuring things out.’ When I was visiting a nganga, a medicine person in Zimbabwe, Mandaza Kandemwa, alongside whom I worked as a healer on many occasions over ten years, he said something that’s guided me since: “When human beings sit in council, the spirits sit in council as well.” His sense is that the sacred is a council: it’s the interconnection of all the different points of light. It’s the net of Indra. A field of knowing constituted of all the different parts in interrelationship – that is what the sacred is.
When you sat in council within the Whale, you were with those elders who’d been informed for generations and generations about the way to meet the sacred. They had their own individual and collective experiences, and so we understand that you have to meet the sacred wholly, and then the holy is there. Part of the relationship with Spirit involves stepping away from the horrifically narcissistic dangers of individualism. Everywhere we locate the sacred, we also find interconnection, as in the natural world.
SE: When you bring up the problem of individuism, I think about how challenging it is to get people to think broadly and collectively in terms of what’s good for all humanity, let alone all beings on the planet. There’s this fear reaction of collective action and purpose or identity, really a kind of twisted up notion of collectivity as entirely negative, group think, et cetera. Sorry, I know you don’t want to focus on our problems.
DM: Because we keep refocusing on ourselves, it’s important to keep coming back to ‘Let’s not talk about our problems’ precisely because it’s so hard to stay away from focusing on ourselves, whether as individuals or as humans. So this is a practice of looking at what’s been invisible to us, which is the presence of Spirit. A practice of going back to what was shown, rather than what we didn’t see or don’t want to see.
Was there an initiatory event that opened you to recognizing your materialistic way of thinking? How did Spirit reveal itself to you?
SE: For me, following the writer’s path has meant that I’m always making meaning my focus, my purpose, and attuned to listening to and observing the world, trying to see and feel the patterns. So although I come from no spiritual tradition – on the contrary, an anti-spiritual tradition via my upbringing, education and culture – I think being an artist primed me to be receptive to the sacred.
Now I can look back and see how Spirit has guided my life, if I view it that way. There wasn’t a key initiatory event, but what did open me up most consciously to the sacred was spending more time in nature. I did a great deal of that after writing my second book, in part because I’d become injured and needed to stay off the computer, in part because I felt evermore compelled to immerse myself in nature. I found myself growing desperately alarmed at the ecocidal path that our culture is on, and it seemed to me that we were never going to come to our senses without recognising our own limits and narcissism. I came to see and feel, deeply, that the human is not the centre of reality but part of the whole, and that the whole is animate, conscious, intentional – everything we are and more. As well, I’ve always paid attention to dreams, and about a decade ago I experienced a couple that were powerfully, undeniably spiritual in tone and images. These helped push me into humbly recognising the arrogance and limits of my materialist mindset – and also the tremendous loss of spiritual and life wisdom from our ancestors that’s happened as a result of our obsession with mechanical, materialistic thinking.
DM: We’re at a critical moment, and it’s a moment of consciousness. Stepping into a world where Spirit exists – stepping into, finally, the real world, being able to remember it as Indigenous people have known it forever – is for us Westerners as great a mental shift as it’s possible to make. Like the consequences for Copernicus and Galileo when they understood that the Earth went around the sun.
SE: An apt analogy!
DM: Yes, the sun. It’s not that Spirit is the sun; it’s that Spirit is the entire universe, and we circle a light that it shines to us and that keeps us in relationship to others who are circling this light, and are warmed by it, and have life because of it. Because we’re at a certain distance from it, but not too far, the structure of the solar system as we know it isn’t a bad analogy, though not the whole.
But here’s the important moment: we either talk about what we didn’t know, or we talk about what we see. Once you know the reality of ecocide, once you say that word, nothing else has to be said except what follows from that knowledge, what you now see/understand differently: what you see in the natural world that’s different, what your experiences from Spirit have been – that’s the mind shift. I can’t emphasise how important this is. If we continue to look at and articulate and be obsessed with what’s wrong then we find ways to meet it that are familiar in terms of how we solve problems, and they’re not working. I’m not saying leaving them altogether, for some people have to focus on familiar problem solving, but for those of us who have felt and experienced and seen the irrefutable presence of Spirit, the next step is learning how to listen and take direction. We really don’t know what to do to restore the natural world and sanity without Spirit’s teachings; everything we have ‘done’ until now has brought us to this place of devastation. So your dream comes: Learn the protocol; enter into the mind-body-being-universe of Whales. Then …? Then we’ll see what becomes possible and how.
In 2010, I had a dream: I won a contest, and the prize was that I would go to New York and be part of a program, after which I would be or think like and move in the world like an Indigenous elder. When I woke up, I understood, after sitting with the dream for some time, that it was instruction. Not about going to New York, but learning how to be an Indigenous elder. I enrolled myself, so to speak, in my own program, and as I think back upon it now – I didn’t realise it until this moment – I changed to a great extent what I was reading. I started reading far more Indigenous literature and thinking than I had before; I started listening even more deeply to my Indigenous friends and colleagues; and I asked myself at every moment when I had to make a decision, How might an uncolonised, Indigenous elder respond to this situation? In part I’m doing that with you now, coming back again and again saying, What do we see, what are our experiences? That dream, and my understanding that it was instruction, changed me, and we would not be having this conversation if I’d not responded to my dream in that way.
Before writing A Rain of Night Birds, when I was in the desert and hoping for the next novel, I heard a voice saying, ‘You know. Her name is Sandra Birdswell and she is a meteorologist.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t know!’ Yet even as I responded, I knew that I was being given something by Spirit and had a mandate to write whatever came, which required enormous research, thinking, listening, yielding and daring. Daring to say the book was given in that way. Daring to write things that I knew would be challenged if not ridiculed. But it was what was given, and the next six years verified that it was given because of all the other events and revelations that came and made a whole of the book.
If there had just been a voice one time and I never heard anything again, that would be meaningless. But when we listen and enter into a field, a council if you will, of events and synchronicities and revelations and experiences that we ourselves could never have created on our own, then we know we’re in the domain of the sacred.
SE: In this sense holding council, even with just one person, seems crucial to yielding to the sacred. We need support for daring to listen to, take seriously, and follow our experiences of the sacred in these times. Even you, with all your years of following the sacred, still had that feeling of, Wow, I really have to say things that might seem totally out there to people! Yet you did, and it seems to me that having a council and/or a spiritually focused community made that possible.
DM: It’s essential. When you sit in a circle with people and the conversation is about Spirit, and how Spirit has come or how Spirit is directing, the fact that Spirit exists is the ground. So, everything you say is enhanced by or grounded in Spirit’s existence, and our relationship to it, and the possibility that that kind of alliance might in fact save the planet. You have the assumption that you want it saved and that you’d give everything to do that – that forms a different kind of conversation. Our conversation right now is grounded in the councils we’ve been in and those assumptions. We don’t step out of that when we step out of those councils.
SE: It’s beautiful and supportive what you just said, that once we sit in council, those councils go with us. You’ve spoken of the field as a kind of container as well.
DM: The field is composed of all of us and we emerge out of it, as if born out of it but never leaving it. It is of us and we are of it.
In January 2017, when I met with the Elephant people in Thula Thula, South Africa, I understood that our interactions could only occur because we were in a field of consciousness together: we were brought to a meeting place and had an interaction that was articulate and specific.
SE: And that field existed because you responded to the call of Elephant?
DM: Right. And again and again over 18 years. In retrospect, I understand that I had to show up all those other times, and every time I did, there was an interaction, the field was being built. It wasn’t only that I showed up, but that the Elephant people showed up as well.
When I went to Thula Thula in 2017 and could say, without awkwardness, ‘I’m going to meet the Elephant people,’ capital E, I understood that I could no longer write ‘Elephant’ with a small ‘e’ any more than I would write Canadian with a small ‘c.’ But then, I could no longer write ‘Cow’ with a small ‘c’ either because the experience with the Elephant people taught me that they are as humans are: conscious beings who exercise spiritual intent.
As I write these days and capitalize the different species or peoples, my consciousness changes. Because then, I’m always in a kind of council with them, a council that extends because we sit in council with the humans as well as the nonhumans, and our human minds change.
SE: How powerful it is to make that seemingly small change on the page: from small ‘e’ to capital ‘E.’ I’ve been disturbed for a long time now by our human-centric narratives in literature, how these reinforce a poisonous and frankly wrong-headed worldview. Amitav Ghosh observes that although the nonhuman had and has agency in many narrative traditions, in modern Western literature nonhuman agency has been relegated to “the outhouses of science fiction and fantasy” (66). Making that shift in capitalisation loosens our grip on the narrative, so we start to perceive and tell different kinds of stories. It’s a radical change, and also a return to the old ways and understandings.
DM: Suppose an Inuit man or woman said, ‘I had this dream and Bear came and talked to me about how to walk out on the ice and fish.’ She wouldn’t say ‘a bear came’ but Bear came, capital B implicit. When you read that, you’re getting an entirely different understanding just by that capital: Bear came, a profound spiritual being, and it really happened. To incorporate that into our literature or writing or speaking is to change our minds, to create a literature or conversation through which the earth and our consciousness can be restored.
Imagine if we began to think of our writing and speaking as having to do with connection and relationship rather than indulging a language that’s so combative and therefore constantly honours combat. There are many things we can do to undermine war, but one of them is to stop thinking in terms of war and to stop referencing war constantly.
SE: Part of what’s so unbearable about listening to mainstream news, political discussions, economics, and so on is the incessant repetition of military metaphors, a combative way of looking at each other and the world. What you’ve called the Literature of Restoration offers a way changing our stories, our language.
DM: Changing our stories, changing our paragraphs, changing our sentences, changing our words. The Literature of Restoration is not something developed yet; it’s something I’ve been thinking about and gave a name to, an opportunity for all of us to discover what it might be. I can’t do it alone and shouldn’t attempt it. Perhaps, there’s nothing any of us should do alone except to be in solitude with Spirit at times when we need it.
I was in a circle with a woman who was trying to think about how she might speak differently. She was speaking of a woman she’d been with in Nicaragua, and said, ‘Listening to her, I was held captive.’ And then she said, ‘Wait a moment. Held captive? No, that’s not what happened.’ She had to find language that did not speak of violence in order to honour.
The Native American writer Robin W. Kimmerer, who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass, speaks of how the English language is so full of ‘I’ instead of we, and how it makes Spirit an object. She notes that the Anishinaabe language does not divide the world between he, she and it, but between animate and inanimate. This distinction asserts an entirely different world. Here’s what she says:
Imagine your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and someone says, ‘Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair.’ We might snicker at such a mistake, at the same time that we recoil. In English, we never refer to a person as ‘it.’ Such a grammatical error would be a profound act of disrespect. ‘It’ robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a thing. And yet in English, we speak of our beloved Grandmother Earth in exactly that way, as ‘it.’ The language allows no form of respect for the more-than-human beings with whom we share the Earth […] In our language there is no ‘it’ for birds or berries […] The grammar of animacy is applied to all that lives: sturgeon, mayflies, blueberries, boulders and rivers. We refer to other members of the living world with the same language that we use for our family. Because they are our family.
SE: So in learning the protocol for approaching the sacred, we have receiving certain dreams as spiritual communication and guidance for the community; approaching the sacred wholly by sitting in council together; entering into a conscious field with our nonhuman family; and finally, changing our language to shift our minds.
One more thing feels important to speak about: beauty. In your book Entering the Ghost River, you tell a story about coming to understand Spirit through beauty. Beauty is central to your work and what you’ve articulated in the . Beauty seems to me one way – maybe the way – that everyone feels the sacred, though they might not call it that. Does part of the protocol we’re learning involve honouring beauty?
DM: Beauty is experienced in many different ways. But the visual is also at its heart, and the ability to see beauty is a great gift. I’m using the word ‘see’ very deliberately because seeing is so important to English speakers. Visually, from my point of view, there is not a single millimetre on the Earth – the part that hasn’t been touched by human hands – that isn’t beautiful. Beauty is a force, and it’s also how Spirit reveals itself. In terms of a path, seeing beauty and then honouring it is a way of recognising the presence of Spirit.
The story I tell in Entering the Ghost River happened in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. My ex-husband brought me there for the first time, knowing it was going to be an incredible experience. As we were driving, we hit incredible storms and went through one of those initiation stories: the rains come, the mud is thick, everything is dangerous, you can’t get there, the car doesn’t go, you run out of food, you meet a stranger, you stop at a little hut and ask for directions and the directions they give you are impossible to follow, so you keep going and trying, and you pick up this old man … [Laughs.] I’m so scared at this point, the roads are so slippery and we’re on a cliff, that I get out and walk while Michael is driving the car and this elder, this Native American Diné man is sitting in the back of it eating the nuts that we gave him – it was all we had to offer – and he’s laughing!
We dropped him off about 1,000 yards from the entrance to Canyon de Chelly, and when we got to the very entrance, the road was completely dry.
Michael then did this amazing thing. He blindfolded me and took me to this outlook, and I looked out at this extraordinary canyon and the mountains around it. It was sunset, and the lightning and the colours of the sunset and clouds were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. We’d arrived at a moment that could not have been choreographed, that would not have happened if we hadn’t arrived exactly at sunset because we had gotten stuck in the mud – one of those. I looked at the cliffs, which are rust colour and blue from the copper, extraordinarily beautiful, painted, and I knew: This Beauty comes from a great Heart. Love – heart – are at the very core of creation. Beauty and Heart are the same, just different ways of seeing, different manifestations.
That was so powerful an impression – and I mean it pressed itself into my consciousness – that I’ve been marked by it. It’s a living mark: I’m always aware of Beauty, the beauty that’s the essence of the natural world, and that’s changed my life as much as anything, and confirmed the reality of the Divine. Our collective task, as I see it and expressed it in that book, is to re-establish the sacred universe and render the signature of the Divine visible – beauty.
To read or hear other interviews with Deena go .
The Lost Etiquette: Sharon English in conversation with Deena Metzger
Recently I was interviewed by Sharon English. The interview I have posted below can be found at The Dark Mountain Project.
I met Deena Metzger in 2014 when she visited Canada to teach a weekend workshop on story and healing. As a teacher and writer myself, deeply interested in how writers can address ecological and social crisis, the workshop theme intrigued me. Deena’s biography described her as “a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman” who has been devoted to “investigating Story as a form of knowing and healing.” Excitingly, her notion of ‘healing’ seemed radically extended to include “life-threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration.” Still, I knew nothing of the extraordinary individual awaiting me, with whom I’ve been fortunate to continue learning and seeking since.
“Who do we have to become to find the forms and sacred language with which to meet these times?” Deena’s life is certainly one possible answer to her own question. Spanning many decades, her work interweaves activism, art and community building with a rare courage to cross frontiers such as the reality of animal intelligence and agency, and the reality of spirit. Her book The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them was published in one volume in 1977 with Tree, one of the first books written about breast cancer. The book coincided with the printing of the exuberant post-mastectomy photograph of Deena, called “Tree” or “Warrior”, which has been shared worldwide. It took the third publisher, North Atlantic Press, to have the courage when reissuing Tree to print the poster image on the cover. Since writing Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing (2002), which came out of a decade’s work with animals and Indigenous medicine, Deena has held ReVisioning Medicine gatherings for those trained in Western medicine who long to be healers too and also Daré, a monthly gathering for the community at her home in Topanga, California, and a practice that has spread to other North American cities.
Drawing on myth, Indigenous and other wisdom traditions that have been lifetime pre-occupations, Deena has articulated a vision of why and how we must create a culture that does no harm, called the . She’s recently been touring her new novel, A Rain of Night Birds (2017), which addresses ecological crisis and the necessity of bridging the disparity between Indigenous and Western mind. I caught up with her on Skype in August, 2017.
Sharon English: Let’s start with the invitation which Dark Mountain made with Issue 12, which led us to this conversation: an invitation to reflect on our experience of the sacred in a time of unravelling and how that experience might call our contemporary assumptions into question.
Deena Metzger: I think the essential questions are: How is the sacred implicit in whatever possibilities exist for this time? How can our own experiences of the sacred inform our activism? I think you know that, for me, the only hope that I really see for a future for the planet and all life is following the direction and the guidance of the sacred, being aware of its presence.
SE: Yes, yet the sacred and spirit have had a very bad rap. On the one hand, because religion has been put into the service of the dominator culture, many people associate the spiritual with something oppressive or at least conforming. On the other hand, New Age spirituality seems too bound up in the individual – ‘what’s sacred to you’ – to be relevant in a time of unravelling.
DM: I would prefer not to go there. Because if we go there, we’re focusing on the human, when what we’re called to do is to listen and respond to the sacred. How you and I have experienced the sacred, without reference to how it has not been experienced, feels very important to me. What feels essential is speaking about the sacred, and the awareness that this is what Indigenous people have always known and what has sustained them. My interest is in returning to the old wisdom and bringing it back so that the planet can be saved.
Terrence Green, one of the protagonists in A Rain of Night Birds, is clear about this as he, a climatologist, faces the reality of the planet’s unravelling. A mixed blood man, he became Chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Studies, but his grief awakens the Native teachings transmitted to him by his grandfather. This is 2007. It’s the time of the International Panel on Climate Change. In this stunning report, he finds two small references to TEK: traditional ecological knowledge. Within thousands of pages of scientific data and analysis, he finds two small references, four or five sentences. This both moves and grieves him. His response is to go to the Mountain where his grandfather took him as a child to teach him about the old ways. As he prays to the Mountain and apologises for having left the red path – even though he left it for reasons that were theoretically on behalf of his people, learning what Westerners were doing so that he could help Native people adjust to the way we are living – he realises exactly how much he betrayed his soul for entering into Western living:
He was speaking aloud, but he didn’t know to whom he was speaking, or whether he was speaking, or in a dream of speaking, or in a spirit realm to which he had been transported by what appeared to be injury, but was also something else. [The injury is the Earth’s injury and his own injury.] There was a thousand different ways he’d accepted that spirits are real although Western mind was a miasma of denial that entered through the cracks and fissures of his being, like water seeping through rock, undermining the original structure of all things. (174)
I think that’s all that needs to be said: Western mind IS a miasma of denial that undermines the true nature of the world. So then, how can we make our way back? How do we accept Spirit as reality, not illusion? And what is Spirit saying to us?
You’ve recently had a remarkable dream that is teaching you/us a lost etiquette. I’ve also had such dreams. They come from Spirit. This novel was given to me by Spirit. These gifts are our “evidence”. They offer guidance. They teach us what is important to bring forth. When I heard your dream, I knew that you were being guided and were dreaming in the old ways, which means not for you personally or psychologically, but as a teaching for all of us.
SE: I’ll retell it now for readers. The dream came early this summer:
I’m attending a council of Indigenous people held inside an orca. First, I’m shown that the orca has two spaces: a small opening in its body that has something to do with healing, like a healing chamber, and also a larger opening like two skin flaps that part and lead into a sizable circular chamber, like a tent, with a floor and walls of black and white orca skin. I enter.
Inside, a group of Indigenous people are sitting in a circle around a simple altar of animal skin with objects placed on it. An elder sits on the far side. I sit down in the circle, directly across from the elder. I’m the only non-Indigenous person. It occurs to me that I’m not sitting in the right place, that maybe I shouldn’t be facing the elder so directly, so I change places in the circle so I’m more to the side. I feel like I’m being invited here for the first time and am learning the protocol.
One of the biggest teachings for me, in opening to the sacred and spirit, has been coming to understand dreams as language or communication that aren’t only about the isolated individual. That dreams can hold meaning for the community, and come through us, not only from our own psyches.
The great danger at the core of Western thinking is our belief that we are the world, the centre of things. So when we respond to the crises in our world we assume it’s up to us to figure them all out – the very kind of self-involved thinking that got us here. We have no sense of living in a field of relationships with other creatures who possess their own traditions, wisdom, consciousness and agency. That when it comes to our world crises, everybody, human and nonhuman, needs to be at the table. At this point it’s we who need to be guided by whales and spirit, or Spirit-as-Whales.
DM: The dream is about more than being guided by Whales. In the dream, you enter into the Whale, and the council is taking place inside the Whale. In other words, in the dream, Whale consciousness is the sacred world we enter. That’s the territory in which this Indigenous council is taking place. As the Whales or other beings live in our consciousness, we are now living within the Whales’ consciousness.
Furthermore, you are aware that you don’t know how to deport yourself in this setting. As more of us experience the presence of the sacred, we have to figure out the protocol, the etiquette for approaching this realm and those within it. We have to re-learn what our Indigenous ancestors knew and also discover how to proceed at this time in history. Here the sacred is within the body-mind of the great ones, in this case, Whale. We have to go into the internal place where the field exists, the consciousness we need. In a sense like the story of Jonah – except we hope to keep living there, not leave.
When a dream like this comes as a teaching for the community, it’s not going to be an easy dream to understand. We’re going to have to sit with what it means. You and I may not know all its dimensions as we’re speaking to each other, so we carry it for as long as necessary, bringing it to others who might help to reveal its profound mystery. We do this because we understand that such dreams can be the source of wisdom. In the old, old days, no matter which Indigenous culture one was part of, if there was something going on that was really difficult or terrible, one would ask for a dream. The community of elders would gather and hope that a dream would come, or someone would come and say they’d had a dream, and people would gather to listen to it. This happened with your dream: you responded to it in the old, old ways by bringing it to me. We talked about what it might mean, and then I suggested that you take this dream to the community. And you did. Those you’ve shared it with have pondered it with you. We are not asking the personal meaning of the dream, ‘What is this dream for your life?’ Rather we’re considering, ‘What is this dream telling us?’
I had an experience this weekend that feels related: I went Whales watching in the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California. There were so many Whales, such a profusion of wildlife, that the guides on the boat were astonished. Again and again they marvelled that they had never seen anything like it. I’ve been speaking with friends who live along the coast who’ve also been seeing a remarkable profusion of Whales this summer. Stan Rushworth, a Native novelist, author of the remarkable book Going to Water, speaks of the surprising occurrences of Whales coming in close to the shore and breaching over and over when he is walking on the beach. Cynthia Travis, who founded and directs the grassroots peace-building NGO in Liberia, everyday gandhis, and who lives overlooking the sea in Ft. Bragg, CA, has also been startled by the profusion of Whales.
Cynthia was on the Whales watching boat with me as was Cheryl Potts, with whom I share my land in Topanga. Cynthia and I have travelled to Africa to many times. At the moment when we found ourselves among several different kinds of Whales, and kinds of Dolphins and Sea Lions, Cynthia wondered if the Whales were coming to us deliberately in the way that the Elephants came to us. So maybe your dream isn’t accidental, but part of a consciousness being held by Whales that’s alerting us humans to what’s happening on the planet – and to the fact that there’s a protocol required. That’s the sacred knowledge being transmitted: first, that we’re within Whales’ consciousness, and second, that there’s an etiquette we have to learn.
SE: In Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, he notes how various thinkers have begun to use the word uncanny in relation to macro ecological events because, he says, they’re recognising what we’ve long turned away from: “the presence and proximity of the nonhuman interlocutors” (30). Having to learn the etiquette for approaching the nonhuman and the sacred – that’s such a different teaching than this idea that ecological events are uncanny, a concept that suggests the world of the nonhuman is unsettling, inexplicable, and even creepy. There’s a great humility required to accept that we’re being called to learn, not to figure things out, but to learn or recover the ways of relationship to the sacred.
DM: It’s important what you said, “not to figure it out”. We don’t have the capacity to figure it out, and that’s humbling. We learn some from the old, old ways: we learn things about making offerings, about meeting the nonhuman and the sacred with profound respect and honour, and then, we listen deeply to the teachings that come. So your dream was the thing-in-itself and also about it: you went into the sacred and were taught how to approach the sacred.
SE: Yes. In approaching the sacred, council seems integral, as was pointed out in the dream. And your process, whether in Daré or ReVisioning Medicine or writing workshops, is to teach by holding council. Can we talk about what council is and why it’s part of our relationship to the sacred?
DM: It goes back to what you said, ‘It’s not about us figuring things out.’ When I was visiting a nganga, a medicine person in Zimbabwe, Mandaza Kandemwa, alongside whom I worked as a healer on many occasions over ten years, he said something that’s guided me since: “When human beings sit in council, the spirits sit in council as well.” His sense is that the sacred is a council: it’s the interconnection of all the different points of light. It’s the net of Indra. A field of knowing constituted of all the different parts in interrelationship – that is what the sacred is.
When you sat in council within the Whale, you were with those elders who’d been informed for generations and generations about the way to meet the sacred. They had their own individual and collective experiences, and so we understand that you have to meet the sacred wholly, and then the holy is there. Part of the relationship with Spirit involves stepping away from the horrifically narcissistic dangers of individualism. Everywhere we locate the sacred, we also find interconnection, as in the natural world.
SE: When you bring up the problem of individuism, I think about how challenging it is to get people to think broadly and collectively in terms of what’s good for all humanity, let alone all beings on the planet. There’s this fear reaction of collective action and purpose or identity, really a kind of twisted up notion of collectivity as entirely negative, group think, et cetera. Sorry, I know you don’t want to focus on our problems.
DM: Because we keep refocusing on ourselves, it’s important to keep coming back to ‘Let’s not talk about our problems’ precisely because it’s so hard to stay away from focusing on ourselves, whether as individuals or as humans. So this is a practice of looking at what’s been invisible to us, which is the presence of Spirit. A practice of going back to what was shown, rather than what we didn’t see or don’t want to see.
Was there an initiatory event that opened you to recognizing your materialistic way of thinking? How did Spirit reveal itself to you?
SE: For me, following the writer’s path has meant that I’m always making meaning my focus, my purpose, and attuned to listening to and observing the world, trying to see and feel the patterns. So although I come from no spiritual tradition – on the contrary, an anti-spiritual tradition via my upbringing, education and culture – I think being an artist primed me to be receptive to the sacred.
Now I can look back and see how Spirit has guided my life, if I view it that way. There wasn’t a key initiatory event, but what did open me up most consciously to the sacred was spending more time in nature. I did a great deal of that after writing my second book, in part because I’d become injured and needed to stay off the computer, in part because I felt evermore compelled to immerse myself in nature. I found myself growing desperately alarmed at the ecocidal path that our culture is on, and it seemed to me that we were never going to come to our senses without recognising our own limits and narcissism. I came to see and feel, deeply, that the human is not the centre of reality but part of the whole, and that the whole is animate, conscious, intentional – everything we are and more. As well, I’ve always paid attention to dreams, and about a decade ago I experienced a couple that were powerfully, undeniably spiritual in tone and images. These helped push me into humbly recognising the arrogance and limits of my materialist mindset – and also the tremendous loss of spiritual and life wisdom from our ancestors that’s happened as a result of our obsession with mechanical, materialistic thinking.
DM: We’re at a critical moment, and it’s a moment of consciousness. Stepping into a world where Spirit exists – stepping into, finally, the real world, being able to remember it as Indigenous people have known it forever – is for us Westerners as great a mental shift as it’s possible to make. Like the consequences for Copernicus and Galileo when they understood that the Earth went around the sun.
SE: An apt analogy!
DM: Yes, the sun. It’s not that Spirit is the sun; it’s that Spirit is the entire universe, and we circle a light that it shines to us and that keeps us in relationship to others who are circling this light, and are warmed by it, and have life because of it. Because we’re at a certain distance from it, but not too far, the structure of the solar system as we know it isn’t a bad analogy, though not the whole.
But here’s the important moment: we either talk about what we didn’t know, or we talk about what we see. Once you know the reality of ecocide, once you say that word, nothing else has to be said except what follows from that knowledge, what you now see/understand differently: what you see in the natural world that’s different, what your experiences from Spirit have been – that’s the mind shift. I can’t emphasise how important this is. If we continue to look at and articulate and be obsessed with what’s wrong then we find ways to meet it that are familiar in terms of how we solve problems, and they’re not working. I’m not saying leaving them altogether, for some people have to focus on familiar problem solving, but for those of us who have felt and experienced and seen the irrefutable presence of Spirit, the next step is learning how to listen and take direction. We really don’t know what to do to restore the natural world and sanity without Spirit’s teachings; everything we have ‘done’ until now has brought us to this place of devastation. So your dream comes: Learn the protocol; enter into the mind-body-being-universe of Whales. Then …? Then we’ll see what becomes possible and how.
In 2010, I had a dream: I won a contest, and the prize was that I would go to New York and be part of a program, after which I would be or think like and move in the world like an Indigenous elder. When I woke up, I understood, after sitting with the dream for some time, that it was instruction. Not about going to New York, but learning how to be an Indigenous elder. I enrolled myself, so to speak, in my own program, and as I think back upon it now – I didn’t realise it until this moment – I changed to a great extent what I was reading. I started reading far more Indigenous literature and thinking than I had before; I started listening even more deeply to my Indigenous friends and colleagues; and I asked myself at every moment when I had to make a decision, How might an uncolonised, Indigenous elder respond to this situation? In part I’m doing that with you now, coming back again and again saying, What do we see, what are our experiences? That dream, and my understanding that it was instruction, changed me, and we would not be having this conversation if I’d not responded to my dream in that way.
Before writing A Rain of Night Birds, when I was in the desert and hoping for the next novel, I heard a voice saying, ‘You know. Her name is Sandra Birdswell and she is a meteorologist.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t know!’ Yet even as I responded, I knew that I was being given something by Spirit and had a mandate to write whatever came, which required enormous research, thinking, listening, yielding and daring. Daring to say the book was given in that way. Daring to write things that I knew would be challenged if not ridiculed. But it was what was given, and the next six years verified that it was given because of all the other events and revelations that came and made a whole of the book.
If there had just been a voice one time and I never heard anything again, that would be meaningless. But when we listen and enter into a field, a council if you will, of events and synchronicities and revelations and experiences that we ourselves could never have created on our own, then we know we’re in the domain of the sacred.
SE: In this sense holding council, even with just one person, seems crucial to yielding to the sacred. We need support for daring to listen to, take seriously, and follow our experiences of the sacred in these times. Even you, with all your years of following the sacred, still had that feeling of, Wow, I really have to say things that might seem totally out there to people! Yet you did, and it seems to me that having a council and/or a spiritually focused community made that possible.
DM: It’s essential. When you sit in a circle with people and the conversation is about Spirit, and how Spirit has come or how Spirit is directing, the fact that Spirit exists is the ground. So, everything you say is enhanced by or grounded in Spirit’s existence, and our relationship to it, and the possibility that that kind of alliance might in fact save the planet. You have the assumption that you want it saved and that you’d give everything to do that – that forms a different kind of conversation. Our conversation right now is grounded in the councils we’ve been in and those assumptions. We don’t step out of that when we step out of those councils.
SE: It’s beautiful and supportive what you just said, that once we sit in council, those councils go with us. You’ve spoken of the field as a kind of container as well.
DM: The field is composed of all of us and we emerge out of it, as if born out of it but never leaving it. It is of us and we are of it.
In January 2017, when I met with the Elephant people in Thula Thula, South Africa, I understood that our interactions could only occur because we were in a field of consciousness together: we were brought to a meeting place and had an interaction that was articulate and specific.
SE: And that field existed because you responded to the call of Elephant?
DM: Right. And again and again over 18 years. In retrospect, I understand that I had to show up all those other times, and every time I did, there was an interaction, the field was being built. It wasn’t only that I showed up, but that the Elephant people showed up as well.
When I went to Thula Thula in 2017 and could say, without awkwardness, ‘I’m going to meet the Elephant people,’ capital E, I understood that I could no longer write ‘Elephant’ with a small ‘e’ any more than I would write Canadian with a small ‘c.’ But then, I could no longer write ‘Cow’ with a small ‘c’ either because the experience with the Elephant people taught me that they are as humans are: conscious beings who exercise spiritual intent.
As I write these days and capitalize the different species or peoples, my consciousness changes. Because then, I’m always in a kind of council with them, a council that extends because we sit in council with the humans as well as the nonhumans, and our human minds change.
SE: How powerful it is to make that seemingly small change on the page: from small ‘e’ to capital ‘E.’ I’ve been disturbed for a long time now by our human-centric narratives in literature, how these reinforce a poisonous and frankly wrong-headed worldview. Amitav Ghosh observes that although the nonhuman had and has agency in many narrative traditions, in modern Western literature nonhuman agency has been relegated to “the outhouses of science fiction and fantasy” (66). Making that shift in capitalisation loosens our grip on the narrative, so we start to perceive and tell different kinds of stories. It’s a radical change, and also a return to the old ways and understandings.
DM: Suppose an Inuit man or woman said, ‘I had this dream and Bear came and talked to me about how to walk out on the ice and fish.’ She wouldn’t say ‘a bear came’ but Bear came, capital B implicit. When you read that, you’re getting an entirely different understanding just by that capital: Bear came, a profound spiritual being, and it really happened. To incorporate that into our literature or writing or speaking is to change our minds, to create a literature or conversation through which the earth and our consciousness can be restored.
Imagine if we began to think of our writing and speaking as having to do with connection and relationship rather than indulging a language that’s so combative and therefore constantly honours combat. There are many things we can do to undermine war, but one of them is to stop thinking in terms of war and to stop referencing war constantly.
SE: Part of what’s so unbearable about listening to mainstream news, political discussions, economics, and so on is the incessant repetition of military metaphors, a combative way of looking at each other and the world. What you’ve called the Literature of Restoration offers a way changing our stories, our language.
DM: Changing our stories, changing our paragraphs, changing our sentences, changing our words. The Literature of Restoration is not something developed yet; it’s something I’ve been thinking about and gave a name to, an opportunity for all of us to discover what it might be. I can’t do it alone and shouldn’t attempt it. Perhaps, there’s nothing any of us should do alone except to be in solitude with Spirit at times when we need it.
I was in a circle with a woman who was trying to think about how she might speak differently. She was speaking of a woman she’d been with in Nicaragua, and said, ‘Listening to her, I was held captive.’ And then she said, ‘Wait a moment. Held captive? No, that’s not what happened.’ She had to find language that did not speak of violence in order to honour.
The Native American writer Robin W. Kimmerer, who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass, speaks of how the English language is so full of ‘I’ instead of we, and how it makes Spirit an object. She notes that the Anishinaabe language does not divide the world between he, she and it, but between animate and inanimate. This distinction asserts an entirely different world. Here’s what she says:
Imagine your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and someone says, ‘Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair.’ We might snicker at such a mistake, at the same time that we recoil. In English, we never refer to a person as ‘it.’ Such a grammatical error would be a profound act of disrespect. ‘It’ robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a thing. And yet in English, we speak of our beloved Grandmother Earth in exactly that way, as ‘it.’ The language allows no form of respect for the more-than-human beings with whom we share the Earth […] In our language there is no ‘it’ for birds or berries […] The grammar of animacy is applied to all that lives: sturgeon, mayflies, blueberries, boulders and rivers. We refer to other members of the living world with the same language that we use for our family. Because they are our family.
SE: So in learning the protocol for approaching the sacred, we have receiving certain dreams as spiritual communication and guidance for the community; approaching the sacred wholly by sitting in council together; entering into a conscious field with our nonhuman family; and finally, changing our language to shift our minds.
One more thing feels important to speak about: beauty. In your book Entering the Ghost River, you tell a story about coming to understand Spirit through beauty. Beauty is central to your work and what you’ve articulated in the . Beauty seems to me one way – maybe the way – that everyone feels the sacred, though they might not call it that. Does part of the protocol we’re learning involve honouring beauty?
DM: Beauty is experienced in many different ways. But the visual is also at its heart, and the ability to see beauty is a great gift. I’m using the word ‘see’ very deliberately because seeing is so important to English speakers. Visually, from my point of view, there is not a single millimetre on the Earth – the part that hasn’t been touched by human hands – that isn’t beautiful. Beauty is a force, and it’s also how Spirit reveals itself. In terms of a path, seeing beauty and then honouring it is a way of recognising the presence of Spirit.
The story I tell in Entering the Ghost River happened in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. My ex-husband brought me there for the first time, knowing it was going to be an incredible experience. As we were driving, we hit incredible storms and went through one of those initiation stories: the rains come, the mud is thick, everything is dangerous, you can’t get there, the car doesn’t go, you run out of food, you meet a stranger, you stop at a little hut and ask for directions and the directions they give you are impossible to follow, so you keep going and trying, and you pick up this old man … [Laughs.] I’m so scared at this point, the roads are so slippery and we’re on a cliff, that I get out and walk while Michael is driving the car and this elder, this Native American Diné man is sitting in the back of it eating the nuts that we gave him – it was all we had to offer – and he’s laughing!
We dropped him off about 1,000 yards from the entrance to Canyon de Chelly, and when we got to the very entrance, the road was completely dry.
Michael then did this amazing thing. He blindfolded me and took me to this outlook, and I looked out at this extraordinary canyon and the mountains around it. It was sunset, and the lightning and the colours of the sunset and clouds were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. We’d arrived at a moment that could not have been choreographed, that would not have happened if we hadn’t arrived exactly at sunset because we had gotten stuck in the mud – one of those. I looked at the cliffs, which are rust colour and blue from the copper, extraordinarily beautiful, painted, and I knew: This Beauty comes from a great Heart. Love – heart – are at the very core of creation. Beauty and Heart are the same, just different ways of seeing, different manifestations.
That was so powerful an impression – and I mean it pressed itself into my consciousness – that I’ve been marked by it. It’s a living mark: I’m always aware of Beauty, the beauty that’s the essence of the natural world, and that’s changed my life as much as anything, and confirmed the reality of the Divine. Our collective task, as I see it and expressed it in that book, is to re-establish the sacred universe and render the signature of the Divine visible – beauty.
To read or hear other interviews with Deena go .
June 5, 2018
Deena Metzger’s Opening Convocation at International Free the Elephants Conference & Film Festival April 27-29, 2018, Portland, Oregon
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It is a great honor to be asked to give the convocation speech, to call us together, to invoke the heart that can guide us in this visionary and terrible work which began with an intervention on behalf of eight, now five, Elephants in the Oregon Zoo, extended toward ending Elephant captivity of all kinds, nationally and internationally, and will, certainly reverberate far beyond these goals.
TO WATCH THE VIDEO GO HERE
To think of ending captivity for Elephants (and by extension other non-human beings) is to recognize that the individuals of non-human species are persons. This challenges conventional and imperialist theories of domination and hierarchy and seeks compassionate and respectful relations with all beings. We are engaging in a profound change of mind.
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Photo by Cynthia Travis
Last year, preparing to visit the Elephants in the wild in Africa for the 9th time, I started writing about visiting the Elephant People. I could no longer avoid asserting what Indigenous people on all continents have always known: we are kin with all life. Shortly afterwards, when teaching the Literature of Restoration, an effort to revision Western literature and language, changing basic but often invisible assumptions, so that the survival of the Earth is implicit rather than undermined by how we speak and think, it became evident that the phrase Elephant People required the capitalization of Elephant – and, consequently Whale, Gorilla, Chimpanzee, Wolf, Turtle, etc as we capitalize French or English. Such a simple shift asserts that we are peers, co-participants in the life and activity of this world.
On April 7, 2018, the article in the NY Times on the work of the Nonhuman Rights Project reminded me of sitting with friends in a living room in 1972, reading Christopher Stone’s argument in the California Law Review aloud: Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects. We were electrified. We knew that an original and revolutionary way of thinking had entered the public discourse, and everything would change. In 2017, four Rivers were given the status of legal persons and Mount Taranaki in New Zealand also received legal status.
Even as the natural world and all its beings are violated, mutilated and murdered as never before, we are within another wave of radical recognition and revisioning of the status and relationships between homo-sapiens and all others. There will be encouraging and substantial consequences of this gathering, that we cannot imagine or design. The Elephant People know this and have gathered us to recognize the enormity of their pain and the greatness of their being and wisdom.
The following words are from Intimate Nature: Women’s Bond with Animals, which I edited with Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson in 1998. The words were prescient.
At the center of empathy and compassionate understanding lies the ability to see the other as true peer, to recognize intelligence and communication in all forms, no matter how unlike ourselves these forms might be. It is this gift of empathy and connection, embodied in the relationship between us and other species that enables us to thrive now and into the future. To honor intimacy across the seeming boundaries of species is to return the sacred to the world.
Let me dare say at the outset that the Elephant People have spiritual agency and are articulate if invisible presences here. Over the last twenty years, friends, colleagues, some of you in this room, and I have heard calls to meet “the others”, have experienced mysterious, unfathomable, incomprehensible, but true and irrefutable connections with non-humans. I will tell some stories about the Elephant People here so that we may wonder together at the nature of our kin relationships. These stories are about Elephants sending out calls, about Elephants having agency and our willingness to follow.
In 1998, I had had a dream of a Matriarch performing a mourning ritual over a dead bull whose tusks had been hacked away. I did not think my psyche had created the dream. I thought that the dream had been sent and began to feel a disquieting and baffling longing to “sit in Council with the Elephants.” I could not explain what this meant.
On epiphany 1999, five of us were at Chobe Wild Animal Park in Botswana. At the last hour of our last day in the park, a bull elephant was grazing a half-mile away on a strip of green that bordered the muddy river. I called to him in my mind. He began to walk steadily and determinedly toward the open bed of the truck where I was watching not without a kind of holy terror of what was occurring. The Elephant stopped, twisted his trunk in an impossible knot and approached.
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We stared in each other’s eyes. Silently, I said, “I know something of who you are. You are from a holocausted people and so am I.” In about ten minutes he moved to the back of the truck and then the other side. A least 30 minutes. Then in a flash, he was gone. We were all overwhelmed. Because the park was closing, we had to make our way against our better judgment along the road as cows and calves came down the incline in a landslide of Elephants. But rather than being hostile, they lined up along the river bowing their heads and flapping their ears as we bowed back. Had I not been with four other people, I never would have believed this. We were shaken to our core. We recognized the Elephant as an Ambassador.
I’m often asked, “What did the Ambassador say?” Elephants have never ‘spoken’ to me in words in my mind except in 2017 when Frankie, the junior Matriarch of the herd given sanctuary at Thula Thula by the “Elephant Whisperer” Lawrence Anthony, asked, “Can you imagine what it is like to be a Matriarch to a herd when I cannot find water for my little ones? Confined on this preserve, I am helpless.”
Although other exchanges were not in human language, precise communication arose through the circumstances of our meetings. Time and time again, narratives emerged that could not be dismissed.
From Chobe, I visited wildlife activist Gillian van Houten at Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa. She and her partner, wildlife filmmaker J. Varty were intending to bring Angus, an Elephant captured after a brutal cull, back to South Africa before he went into musth. Going to Toronto, I wanted to visit Angus at Bowmanville, and the director, Michael Hackenberger, who was ignoring their correspondence, to speak of his return. Though I had made an appointment, confirmed many times, Angus, was not there. However, I did see an agonized bull elephant in musth, chained to a wall. This image has haunted me since. Ultimately Hackenberger agreed to return Angus to South Africa, but not to Varty and van Houten, publicly asserting that the prospective return was not inspired by conservation reasons. Angus died of a trial sedative before being placed on a plane. Hackenberger, the Life of Pi trainer, was later accused of animal cruelty based on a PETA video of him whipping a tiger. Public outrage caused attendance to drop drastically and the zoo was closed down.
In 2005, I was at Chobe with Cynthia Travis of Everyday Gandhis, several peacekeepers from Liberia, two San people from the Kalahari and various others from the US and South Africa. Each year that I returned to Chobe I was scrupulous about spending the last hours of the last day in the park at the Chapungo (Fisher Eagle) tree where we had met the Ambassador. Though we had other encounters at different times, there were always significant meetings in this window of time and space. This time, a Bull Elephant came near and stopped.
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Photo by Cynthia Travis
Then a Cow descended to the river, approaching him with her two calves. She and the Ambassador twisted their trunks together. While the two cows re-ascended the hill, the little bull lingered until he was dismissed, rapped on his butt by the Ambassador as a human father might.
Minutes later, the Ambassador led us forward some hundred feet, stopped, poked at something in the ground and threw us a weathered Elephant thigh bone. The gesture was deliberate. He turned, twisted his trunk as he had in 1999, went down on his knees, rose up, and disappeared into the bush.
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In 2011, Krystyna Jurzykowski, Founder and Chairperson of the Board of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Texas, and I returned to Chobe. We were parked at the Chapungo Tree at the last hours of the last day. Suddenly, we were alarmed when a very small Elephant came down to the water hole alone.
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We watched carefully, concerned that we could not protect it from a predator as humans must not interfere in the life of the wild. All we could do is pray. After about twenty minutes, a herd began descending. A bull elephant and a cow, seemingly the dominant ones, approached the little one together and all began crossing the shallow river. For a while, the area was deserted, but in the last hour the herd returned, including the Bull, the Cow and the little one. Then a car pulled up to the water hole and the driver jumped out with his camera, causing great agitation. He obstinately ignored our warnings as some members of the herd went to the rise on the road and blocked it. Returning to the car, he revved the engine and started up aggressively. When he reached the Elephants, he did not slow down and one of them rose up and trumpeted with clear anger. We did not know if they would part in time or smash the car. They parted. The Elephants returned to the river. Now, it was time for us to go. I turned the key and began moving very slowly but the Elephants returned to their former station and blocked our way.
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So I turned off the engine, accepting that we might have to stay in the park. But when our acquiescence was clear, the Elephants parted and let us on our way.
Cynthia Travis and I traveled to Tanzania in 2008 with a team including ex-child soldiers, an ex-rebel general and peacebuilders. We wondered if we would have equivalent encounters when traveling with a guide in unfamiliar areas. We did.
Then she and I returned to Africa in 2016 and 2017 and were on Safari with both our own guide and local guides who could well be skeptical of our pursuit of such connections. There are so many stories to tell, but in 2017, in Damaraland, Namibia with the Desert Elephants, at the end of a three-week Safari, Cyndie, Matt Meyers, former Chief Ranger at Mala Mala game reserve, and I were following a Bull Elephant who, we realized only on our departure, was the same Bull who had greeted us at the threshold of the last day of our earlier safari in 2016. Although, we had been with him the last three days, this last day was yet far different. He was leading and we were following. After an hour or more, he went up on a rise and began battling a little sapling until it was broken off. Then to our astonishment, he went down on his knees, turned his back to us and went to sleep. Neither we, nor Matt had ever been with an Elephant when he lay down. We waited for twenty minutes and departed.
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Later in the day, the last hours, we came upon him again, or he came upon us, and we followed him respectfully, his actions and direction clearly intentional. At the time we had to return to the Lodge, the Bull hid himself in dense shrubbery. Were we to leave or wait? We felt tested. We were ready to depart when he trumpeted, emerged and proceeded in the direction we would go as well, stopping so frequently to piss and defecate, which Elephants do when happily greeting each other, we noted it. The he set out from the sand rivers toward a watering hole filled by local people in return for receiving water from the government for themselves. He was headed north and so were we. With timing that could not have been planned and could not have been casual, he emerged out of the shadow of a shale ridge and was illuminated by the last light of the setting sun.
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We were undone by awe. He continued his parallel way across the desert, his footsteps illuminated by a light from an invisible source.
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As we pursue this most demanding, essential and sacred work together, let us keep this question in our hearts: Who are these sacred beings who have gathered us here? May we free them from sacrilege and violation, restore old, old wise ways while creating new relationships among all beings.
I am closing with a poem of mine:
MNdlovu Mind
Suddenly, I am of a single mind extended
across an unknown geography,
imprinted, as if by a river, on the moment.
A mind held in unison by a large gray tribe
meandering in reverent concert
among trees, feasting on leaves.
One great eye reflecting blue
from the turn inward
toward the hidden sky that, again,
like an underground stream
continuously nourishes
what will appear after the dawn
bleaches away the mystery in which we rock
through the endless green dark.
I am drawn forward by the lattice,
by a concordance of light and intelligence
constituted from the unceasing and consonant
hum of cows and the inaudible bellow of bulls,
a web thrumming and gliding
along the pathways we remember
miles later or ages past.
I am, we are—
who can distinguish us?—
a gathering of souls, hulking and muddied,
large enough—if there is a purpose—
to carry the accumulated joy of centuries,
walking thus within each other’s
particular knowing and delight.
This is our grace: To be a note
in the exact chord that animates creation,
the dissolve of all the rivers
that are both place and moment,
an ocean of mind moving
forward and back,
outside of any motion
contained within it.
This is particle and wave. How simple
The merest conversation between us
becoming the essential drone
into which we gladly disappear.
A common music, a singular heavy tread,
ceaselessly carving a path,
for the waters tumbling invisibly
beneath.
I have always wanted to be with them, with you, so.
I have always wanted to be with them,
with you,
so.
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June 28, 2017
The Mystery: Approaching the Elephant People After Seventeen Years Part II
The Mystery was published in issue # 5 of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, edited and published by Lise Weil.
Dark Matter publishes writing and visual art created in response to an age of massive species loss and ecological disaster. It is a home for dreams, visions, and communications with the nonhuman world…especially those with messages for how we might begin to heal our broken relationship to the earth.
Here are some words from what may be a last essay (see below) on our meetings since 2000:
“Accepting that direct communication and analysis came from the Elephant People allowed the field we were in together to become visible. We realized that we had been in ‘spirits’ theater for seventeen years, simultaneously actors and audience.
Neither Elephant nor human could have designed such situations in which members of both species appear to each other as if explicitly summoned. While our meetings were both intentional and circumstantial, the sum total of our many interactions over time, hours, days, weeks, years, cohered in nested living stories that became the language through which we, different species though we are, spoke to each other. This occurred both within and outside of time and space. We had been transported to another dimension where meaning and action are simultaneous and indistinguishable. The story that emerged from and enfolded us challenged all conventional assumptions of reality and hegemony.
We had returned to the Elephants, again and again, at the behest of the Ambassador, and in return we were allowed to participate in a common field of consciousness that manifested unpredictably. Clearly both human and non-human were impacted by each other. Attuned to one another, we began to share a critical DNA of mind from which future connections and understandings would emerge. That is, we melted toward each other and, ultimately, without changing shape, we melted into each other….
***
Deena Metzger
The Mystery: Approaching the Elephant People
This is a response to the darkest times. We know all life is threatened, and increasingly so under the current administration, yet we inevitably respond from our human perspectives and fears. However, we will not understand what we must without recognizing non-human wisdom. In 2010, several of us had dreams indicating that there are hidden passageways, different for each of us, to saving the earth and restoring the natural world. For me, making alliances with animals and other non-human beings became an essential path.
In 1997, as co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology, Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, which testified to animal intelligence and agency, I was introduced to one of the great mysteries: the true nature of the beings with whom we cohabit the planet which I could only begin to understand by stepping out of my own mind into the consciousness of others.
As many of you reading this know, I met an Elephant we call the Ambassador on Epiphany, January 6th, 2000, in Chobe National Park, Botswana. Traveling to various African wild animal reserves over the next seventeen years, I realized I was engaging with different Elephants and herds while fulfilling the mandate implicit in the original meeting to regard the Elephants as kin.
A few years ago, I was alerted to Elephants in Assam, India occupying an airstrip to prevent military planes taking off and landing. There were also a series of attacks on humans in India and around the globe that seemed to avenge earlier assaults on Elephants, interruption or prevention of mourning rituals, and loss of habitat. It seemed like a global organized activity on the part of the Elephants and I was able to speak of Elephant sovereignty in an article translated into Hindi and circulated in Indian papers.
Very recently, a female Elephant in Hwange killed a big game hunter who was tracking her and her herd. A great white Shark leaped into a fisherman’s boat in Australian waters and a Bear attacked a hunter in Ontario Canada. Regarded as random, these incidents can be understood as conscious non-human responses to intolerable human activities. Animals have a capacity for outrage and retribution as well as surprise and wonder. Once it’s accepted that non-human species have agency and spiritual lives, the world changes and we recognize, against all assumptions, who these others really are.
In the early sixties, a black Panther escaped Jungleland in Thousand Oaks, California. Then a lion escaped from a Midwest zoo and children were bussed to view the hunt. Instinctively, I identified with the animals, imagined what it might feel to be lost and hunted in suburbia and wrote a novel, What Rough Beast, (unpublished) from a Lion’s point of view. I entered into his consciousness, his view of being imprisoned, then hunted, and his thoughts about the nature of human beings. Looking back at my life fifty years later, I see a thread, a calling to bear witness to and speak of the true nature of the non-human beings with whom we share the planet and Creation.
January 2017. I returned to Africa for the ninth time to be with the Elephants, holding different questions and marveling at the unpredictable ways they had been addressed by events Cynthia Travis, Matt Meyer, our guide, and I traveled first to Thula Thula, the South African reserve started by Lawrence Anthony, author of The Elephant Whisperer, and then to Chobe where a group of Elephants gathered around us, seemingly out of the blue, at 5 pm on Epiphany, just as the Ambassador had appeared on Epiphany 2000, and then walked back into the forest exactly at 6 pm when we had to leave the park.
[]
Such meetings constitute the ways the Elephants have been conversing with us over time and space. Sequences of events are a language through which we communicate across species–no translation needed.
On January 9th we arrived at Mashatu in Southern Botswana and on January 14th in Damaraland, Namibia. Given that this might very well be a last visit, it was time to approach all the trips and encounters as a single Story, which viewed as such could provide new insights and guidance for human connections to the wild. I was calling on memory – a very Elephant way of being – in order to see the entire pattern of our relating to each other and what arises from that integrated perspective. Alert to the subtlest possible transmission, still I could not distinguish between the Elephants’ intent and Spirits’ objective.
Back at home, I could not speak of the journey. Then I wrote about Thula Thula and Chobe – humans and Elephants communicating with each other about drought (see link above). When Frankie the up-and-coming Matriarch of Thula Thula reproached me and our species for creating drought and bringing misery and death to her people, she was engaging in a direct, grave and strategic transmission. Too often people speak of the Animals’ inviolable love for us. It eases the human heart to think so. But I wouldn’t console myself with the illusion that this communication was tempered by love.
There was more behind it: Humans must change. How? Think with the heart as Indigenous people do. Think ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. Become more Elephant. Become less of what we are and more of the Indigenous and non-human that we have attacked and violated. Become like they are – earth-centered, spirit- centered, relational beings who would never hunt the way we hunt, kill the way we kill, destroy the way we destroy.
Yes. These are good beginnings.
It takes years to step across the species divide and to recognize different species as peers and equals on this planet. It shatters the mind – as it should. It requires undoing the pervasive structures, apparent and subtle, of the dominating, imperial human cultures that have assaulted Indigenous wisdom and what remains of the true nature of the world. The future existence of the planet depends on creating honest working alliances with all the myriad sentient, intelligent non-human beings. Each meeting with the Elephants had been a gift and a mandate leading us to this understanding.
However, the gift of such extraordinary meetings cannot be received without knowing the gravity of extinction, pollution and climate change we have created and without finding ways to heal what we have wrought.
The animals, the Elephants, are aware of our criminal activities and are responding. Integrity requires us to change our ways and minds. This is what they are indicating when they come to meet us.
***
Mashatu Game Reserve consists of 72,000 acres located in the Northern Tuli Game Reserve of Botswana, situated between the Tuli Safari Area, a national park in Zimbabwe and the Mapungubwe National Park, a World Heritage Site in South Africa. As it shares unfenced borders with both the South African and Zimbabwean national parks in the south and north respectively, the animals have a vast area, a long wildlife corridor, to wander through. However, as they are know they are safe within Botswana where hunting is illegal and threatened in Zimbabwe where trophy hunting is encouraged, many animals, if food allows it, avoid crossing into Zimbabwe.
Arriving at Mashatu, we knew we would not experience the intimacy with the animals that we felt with the single herd of Elephants on the 3,000 acres of Thula Thula nor the sense of destiny that came with multiple encounters with Elephants on six different occasions at five in the afternoon at the Chapungu tree in Chobe National Park.
On the last day in Mashatu in 2016, we had been allowed to approach a large herd at a water hole. They departed just at the time we had to repair to an elevated place for a last cup of tea before going to the airport. We were stunned when the herd, split into several lines, approached the Mashatu tree so closely we took cover in the truck. But undeniably, they had come to say good-bye.
Now we were returning a year later. The one desire I had had to listen from within a herd and to greet the Matriarchs formally had been met in Thula Thula and was unlikely again with such a large Elephant population. Earlier, our time in Chobe had confirmed the magical connections we had had there over the years. We accepted that we had been incorporated into a field of co-existence that made communication possible. Now I wondered what insights or messages might come from our next two destinations?
***
In a dry country, rain is luck. Abundant rains had come to Mashatu and were continuing. A pulley system helped us cross a swollen river where the year before we had driven across a dry ravine. Within minutes of going out on a first game drive, the winds picked up and we stopped the Land Rover to put ponchos on before the downpour. In an open vehicle without a roof we were as exposed to the elements as the animals. It was a good beginning.
The rain accompanied us intermittently until sunset as we drove across darkened and then brilliant yellow fields of devil’s thorn with which the female Elephants adorned themselves.
Accepting that we were not at Mashatu to repeat earlier experiences, confirm previous perceptions or gather new proofs of connection, we tried to look at everything with fresh eyes. It was Cyndie who first noticed the gestures of a herd of Elephants moving with great deliberation and intent into a small grove. We followed them curious. There they divided into little groups leaning against the trees, caressing them with their trunks but not eating the leaves. It can be nothing less than devotion, Cyndie said. We had not expected to come upon Elephants in prayer. But… why not?
Returning to the grove several times, we never encountered the Elephants there again. How empty it seemed without their presence converting it into a temple. Although we didn’t see them in prayer, we did come upon them blessing each other.
Beautiful and awesome as this was, I didn’t initially grasp what was being revealed. Anticipating relationship with the Elephants, or continuously hoping for it, I wasn’t aware of what was, in fact, occurring. In retrospect, stepping out of the confinement and limitation of individual events and examining them within a progression over years, writing this piece, seeing the photos again, I understand what I couldn’t then.
We were shown perfect beauty. We were shown … Creation. We were shown the spiritual lives of the Elephants and the animals. We were shown that we had been born into Paradise and had been exiled by our own hands.
Within minutes of driving out of the Camp the first morning, we were astonished by two turtle doves making love on a tree branch. A wondrous instance on a brilliant morning. Several minutes later, we came upon a terrapin in the road and our guide following his intuition looked into the underbrush about twenty feet away where two terrapins were mating. Spirit was getting our attention.
For the rest of the days at Mashatu we marveled at the profusion of life forms. There were newborn and young — Elephant, kudu, impala, zebra, wildebeest, cape buffalo, monkey, baboon, lion, giraffe … — everywhere.
And in Namibia, where we were to go next, even rhino calves.
As if to emphasize the message of fertility, everyone was mating. So it wasn’t a great surprise when we came upon an alpha lion we had seen the day before, sleeping under a tree while ten feet away, a young lioness, stirred restlessly. Unable to control her inner agitation, she approached the lion, circled him, prodded him until he stopped resisting her. What struck us was his kindness.
Our guide indicated that she was immature, had never had cubs, was overwhelmed with estrus. While the lion entered her, almost as if bidden, he did so gently, lowering his mouth to her shoulder to ease her before his thrust.
This sequence repeated again and again.
The last hour of the last day at Mashatu, we found a perch at the summit of a small hill that allowed us to look back toward the plain where we had been present as a great bull Elephant had been courting an Elephant matriarch before the entire herd. Then a startling shriek from a little one who resented the bull’s attention interrupted them and the bull strode away.
Behind us to the east, the herd was dispersing for the night. To the north, two Giraffes, their bodies rosy from the setting sun were standing, enchanted.
We could see that they wanted each other, though they were very still. Then he arched back in a parabola of desire and in seconds they mated in the purple dusk.
It was the last moment of the last day at Mashatu. Then the full moon rose.
We left the field of vision of fertility and creation for Damaraland in Namib, the oldest desert of the world. Here desert Elephants having adjusted to the environment and able to go without water for a few day are frequently born without tusks as a rapid genetic response to poaching. Last year, we saw a tuskless herd in the reserve and this year we were aware of many more tuskless Elephants among the others on the narrow oasis along a sand river where three very small herds sustain themselves.
As at Thula Thula, we were able to have some intimacy with the Elephants, following one and then another in their daily life. While we recognized individual conversations or connections as they occurred, it was only afterwards that I saw a pattern that could appropriately be acknowledged as interconnection. We were a small group, they were a small herd – we were with each other as distinct from observing each other. I was hoping to be able to see the Elephants and other species for themselves, independent of my own understanding. Over time, moments cohere into a Story, a field of vision, and it is the human task to see it for itself.
Thula Thula had prepared me for Damaraland though I didn’t know it at the time. The continuity of drought was an essential element. The abundance, even extravagance, of life forms at Chobe and Mashatu seemed to deny the grave danger of climate change caused by human activity, the on-going struggle for existence, the conflicts between the herders and the wild as a consequence of the lack of water and resources. In Damaraland, we remembered.
The bare but startling beauty of the landscape resembles the moon more than earth, and the Elephants themselves seem to have emerged from the land. In Damaraland as in Thula Thula, it became possible to focus on particular members of the herd. Following their lead when we came upon them, rather than our inclinations, we repeatedly found ourselves in the presence of a great bull Elephant. Only on our return home, at the airport in Frankfurt, did we realize that this great bull had dominated the landscape on the last day we had spent in Damaraland the year before. He had been posed like a sentinel on a rocky incline at the entrance to the lines of trees and desert springs along the sand river.
We had stayed with him for almost an hour, mesmerized. This year, the same; whenever he appeared, we gave ourselves up to him. Without acknowledging us, he silently directed us to stay and we did for long periods of time. The first day, we were parked below an earthen bank where a female was feeding on a tree when he appeared and displaced her. Though we remained with him, there was no indication that he was aware of or interested in us.
Again in our presence, the second day, he approached two young bulls who were trying to topple a tree. He advanced as an elder, demonstrated the right technique for grazing on trees and leaned against it so as to instruct them properly.
When they became rambunctious, he turned abruptly and left. We followed but he went off into the bush.
We were finding him an interesting bull Elephant, but on the third day he astounded us. Then we began to consider that something extraordinary was happening and we were, and were not, peripheral to the event.
We had spent a good part of the afternoon unsuccessfully tracking desert lions along the small dunes, always slightly behind the new footprints in the sand. Then we turned back to the sand river to look for Elephants. Pausing to determine our next move, we saw the Bull Elephant approach the hillock above us and we turned the truck to watch him.
He came slowly and determinedly, tore away some branches and threw them aside as if to extend the space. As was the case seventeen years earlier with the Ambassador, his actions seemed conscious and deliberate. To our astonishment, he then carefully eased his great weight down onto the sand and went to sleep, facing the direction of the lions and allowing his back to us.
Neither Cyndie, I, nor Matt, who had been Head Ranger and Head Photographic Ranger at the private South African game reserve, Mala Mala, had ever seen an Elephant lie down to sleep.
What was communicated?
Trust.
Accepting that direct communication and analysis came from the Elephant People allowed the field we were in together to become visible. We realized that we had been in ‘spirits’ theater for sixteen years, simultaneously actors and audience. Neither Elephant nor human could have designed such situations in which members of both species appear to each other as if explicitly summoned. While our meetings were both intentional and circumstantial, the sum total of our many interactions over time, hours, days, weeks, years, cohered in nested living stories that became the language through which we, different species though we are, spoke to each other. This occurred both within and outside of time and space. We had been transported to another dimension where meaning and action are simultaneous and indistinguishable. The story that emerged from and enfolded us challenged all conventional assumptions of reality and hegemony.
We had returned to the Elephants, again and again, at the behest of the Ambassador, and in return we were allowed to participate in a common field of consciousness that manifested unpredictably. Clearly both human and non-human were impacted by each other. Attuned to one another, we began to share a critical DNA of mind from which future connections and understandings would emerge. That is, we melted toward each other and, ultimately, without changing shape, we melted into each other.
And so we entered the last day. Toward the end of the afternoon before we would have to leave Damaraland, we again came across the bull whom I began calling The Great Elephant. He was waiting for us in the central island of the sand river.
We didn’t know he was waiting for us then, but I know it now. It has taken months to understand this, to see pattern and Story, too often hidden by time and doubt. A deeper understanding, one that encompasses all the years of engagement, beckons. Indigenous people knew this realm, this dimension beyond ours, this field of knowing and being where humans, non-humans, the spirits and earth co-exist beyond relationship.
The Great Elephant was waiting for us …
For the next hour or two, we followed him through the valley as he grazed or hid in the brush until he led us to the vast desert plain that all of us would cross at sundown. Just as night was falling, he would be on his way to a water tank set aside for the Elephants in return for the government digging wells for the Native people living there, and we would be returning to the Lodge.
Soon after we arrived, he left the tree where he had been waiting, turned east and meandered from place to place. At one point, he stopped, certain that we were watching though not glancing at us, and began to twist his trunk into a strange knot that I recognized as the gesture through which the Ambassador greeted us in 2000. He continued contorting his trunk while we observed, moved and mystified.
Finally, he unfolded his trunk, turned and went on.
Following him was complex. We had to be rigorous about not leading, finding a vantage point from which we could see without interfering or challenging him. When he stopped by a small tree, we were already directly in his path and he knew it. There were moments when we felt his love for the tree in the manner of the Elephants in Mashatu and we were simultaneously aware of his comedic threat to topple it upon us. Still, we remained quietly.
Sometimes when he approached, there was a divide between the Damaraland guide’s experience and training in caution and my own deep conviction that we were safe and needed to yield to the bull’s leadership not our fears.
So many minutes passed. It felt like hours or days. Soon he began walking again and we assumed he was leading us out of the valley toward the desert and the mountains.
But, unexpectedly, he entered a thicket and virtually disappeared. We waited and waited, agreeing among ourselves that we would wait no more than twenty more minutes. When the time was almost over, he emerged so dramatically he seemed angry to everyone in the truck. Believing we were completely safe, I begged them to be still and not startle him by turning on the engine. I had been speaking to him in my mind, explaining that this was our last night, actually our last hour, and had pleaded with him to come out as a sign or confirmation of the connection we were all feeling. And so, yes, he emerged.
There was no attack, no threat, nor had there been for all the time we had been with him over four days.
Now he ambled very slowly ahead of us down the stone-faced incline that was also masking the diminishing light. We might have thought he was oblivious to us if he had not defecated several times along the way. A sign of honor. Connection. (When Elephants meet after being separated, sometimes only for hours, they are overjoyed to be in each other’s company and this is expressed through pissing and defecating.)
I kept reminding our impatient guide, eager to return to the Lodge, to slow down and to wait. It was 7:30 and we were an hour late and tired. It was difficult to contain all the energies and stay parallel or behind the Great Elephant so that he could lead.
The Great Elephant came to the stony edge of the slope where the wide plain of the desert opened before us. He stopped. He pissed and defecated again. Not one of us had ever seen such frequency. Slowly, then, with utter presence, he proceeded up the rise and as he paused to spray himself with dust, he caught the exact and fleeting angle of the ruby light of the setting sun.
Then he went on, his footsteps, mysteriously filling with a sourceless light.
The Great Elephant looked back at us one last time.
An Elephant Ambassador came to meet us on January 6th, 2000, Epiphany. Now again, at the very last hour of the very last day, another such meeting.
A spirit? A messenger? An angel?
In the presence of the Great Mystery, it is best to remain wordless.
Deena Metzger has been writing for fifty years. Story is her medicine. Her latest novel, A Rain of Night Birds, a confrontation between indigenous knowledge and the modern scientific mind, bears witness: climate change arises from the same colonial mind that enacted genocide on the Native people of this country. It was published on Earth Day, April 22, 2017. Her other books include the novels La Negra y Blanca (2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature), Feral; Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems; Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing and Tree: Essays and Pieces.
The Mystery: Approching the Elephant People After Seventeen Years
The Mystery was published in issue # 5 of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, edited and published by Lise Weil.
Dark Matter publishes writing and visual art created in response to an age of massive species loss and ecological disaster. It is a home for dreams, visions, and communications with the nonhuman world…especially those with messages for how we might begin to heal our broken relationship to the earth.
Here are some words from what may be a last essay (see below) on our meetings since 2000:
“Accepting that direct communication and analysis came from the Elephant People allowed the field we were in together to become visible. We realized that we had been in ‘spirits’ theater for seventeen years, simultaneously actors and audience.
Neither Elephant nor human could have designed such situations in which members of both species appear to each other as if explicitly summoned. While our meetings were both intentional and circumstantial, the sum total of our many interactions over time, hours, days, weeks, years, cohered in nested living stories that became the language through which we, different species though we are, spoke to each other. This occurred both within and outside of time and space. We had been transported to another dimension where meaning and action are simultaneous and indistinguishable. The story that emerged from and enfolded us challenged all conventional assumptions of reality and hegemony.
We had returned to the Elephants, again and again, at the behest of the Ambassador, and in return we were allowed to participate in a common field of consciousness that manifested unpredictably. Clearly both human and non-human were impacted by each other. Attuned to one another, we began to share a critical DNA of mind from which future connections and understandings would emerge. That is, we melted toward each other and, ultimately, without changing shape, we melted into each other….
***
Deena Metzger
The Mystery: Approaching the Elephant People
This is a response to the darkest times. We know all life is threatened, and increasingly so under the current administration, yet we inevitably respond from our human perspectives and fears. However, we will not understand what we must without recognizing non-human wisdom. In 2010, several of us had dreams indicating that there are hidden passageways, different for each of us, to saving the earth and restoring the natural world. For me, making alliances with animals and other non-human beings became an essential path.
In 1997, as co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology, Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, which testified to animal intelligence and agency, I was introduced to one of the great mysteries: the true nature of the beings with whom we cohabit the planet which I could only begin to understand by stepping out of my own mind into the consciousness of others.
As many of you reading this know, I met an Elephant we call the Ambassador on Epiphany, January 6th, 2000, in Chobe National Park, Botswana. Traveling to various African wild animal reserves over the next seventeen years, I realized I was engaging with different Elephants and herds while fulfilling the mandate implicit in the original meeting to regard the Elephants as kin.
A few years ago, I was alerted to Elephants in Assam, India occupying an airstrip to prevent military planes taking off and landing. There were also a series of attacks on humans in India and around the globe that seemed to avenge earlier assaults on Elephants, interruption or prevention of mourning rituals, and loss of habitat. It seemed like a global organized activity on the part of the Elephants and I was able to speak of Elephant sovereignty in an article translated into Hindi and circulated in Indian papers.
Very recently, a female Elephant in Hwange killed a big game hunter who was tracking her and her herd. A great white Shark leaped into a fisherman’s boat in Australian waters and a Bear attacked a hunter in Ontario Canada. Regarded as random, these incidents can be understood as conscious non-human responses to intolerable human activities. Animals have a capacity for outrage and retribution as well as surprise and wonder. Once it’s accepted that non-human species have agency and spiritual lives, the world changes and we recognize, against all assumptions, who these others really are.
In the early sixties, a black Panther escaped Jungleland in Thousand Oaks, California. Then a lion escaped from a Midwest zoo and children were bussed to view the hunt. Instinctively, I identified with the animals, imagined what it might feel to be lost and hunted in suburbia and wrote a novel, What Rough Beast, (unpublished) from a Lion’s point of view. I entered into his consciousness, his view of being imprisoned, then hunted, and his thoughts about the nature of human beings. Looking back at my life fifty years later, I see a thread, a calling to bear witness to and speak of the true nature of the non-human beings with whom we share the planet and Creation.
January 2017. I returned to Arica for the ninth time to be with the Elephants, holding different questions and marveling at the unpredictable ways they had been addressed by events Cynthia Travis, Matt Meyer, our guide, and I traveled first to Thula Thula, the South African reserve started by Lawrence Anthony, author of The Elephant Whisperer, and then to Chobe where a group of Elephants gathered around us, seemingly out of the blue, at 5 pm on Epiphany, just as the Ambassador had appeared on Epiphany 2000, and then walked back into the forest exactly at 6 pm when we had to leave the park.
[]
Such meetings constitute the ways the Elephants have been conversing with us over time and space. Sequences of events are a language through which we communicate across species–no translation needed.
On January 9th we arrived at Mashatu in Southern Botswana and on January 14th in Damaraland, Namibia. Given that this might very well be a last visit, it was time to approach all the trips and encounters as a single Story, which viewed as such could provide new insights and guidance for human connections to the wild. I was calling on memory – a very Elephant way of being – in order to see the entire pattern of our relating to each other and what arises from that integrated perspective. Alert to the subtlest possible transmission, still I could not distinguish between the Elephants’ intent and Spirits’ objective.
Back at home, I could not speak of the journey. Then I wrote about Thula Thula and Chobe – humans and Elephants communicating with each other about drought (see link above). When Frankie the up-and-coming Matriarch of Thula Thula reproached me and our species for creating drought and bringing misery and death to her people, she was engaging in a direct, grave and strategic transmission. Too often people speak of the Animals’ inviolable love for us. It eases the human heart to think so. But I wouldn’t console myself with the illusion that this communication was tempered by love.
There was more behind it: Humans must change. How? Think with the heart as Indigenous people do. Think ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. Become more Elephant. Become less of what we are and more of the Indigenous and non-human that we have attacked and violated. Become like they are – earth-centered, spirit- centered, relational beings who would never hunt the way we hunt, kill the way we kill, destroy the way we destroy.
Yes. These are good beginnings.
It takes years to step across the species divide and to recognize different species as peers and equals on this planet. It shatters the mind – as it should. It requires undoing the pervasive structures, apparent and subtle, of the dominating, imperial human cultures that have assaulted Indigenous wisdom and what remains of the true nature of the world. The future existence of the planet depends on creating honest working alliances with all the myriad sentient, intelligent non-human beings. Each meeting with the Elephants had been a gift and a mandate leading us to this understanding.
However, the gift of such extraordinary meetings cannot be received without knowing the gravity of extinction, pollution and climate change we have created and without finding ways to heal what we have wrought.
The animals, the Elephants, are aware of our criminal activities and are responding. Integrity requires us to change our ways and minds. This is what they are indicating when they come to meet us.
***
Mashatu Game Reserve consists of 72,000 acres located in the Northern Tuli Game Reserve of Botswana, situated between the Tuli Safari Area, a national park in Zimbabwe and the Mapungubwe National Park, a World Heritage Site in South Africa. As it shares unfenced borders with both the South African and Zimbabwean national parks in the south and north respectively, the animals have a vast area, a long wildlife corridor, to wander through. However, as they are know they are safe within Botswana where hunting is illegal and threatened in Zimbabwe where trophy hunting is encouraged, many animals, if food allows it, avoid crossing into Zimbabwe.
Arriving at Mashatu, we knew we would not experience the intimacy with the animals that we felt with the single herd of Elephants on the 3,000 acres of Thula Thula nor the sense of destiny that came with multiple encounters with Elephants on six different occasions at five in the afternoon at the Chapungu tree in Chobe National Park.
On the last day in Mashatu in 2016, we had been allowed to approach a large herd at a water hole. They departed just at the time we had to repair to an elevated place for a last cup of tea before going to the airport. We were stunned when the herd, split into several lines, approached the Mashatu tree so closely we took cover in the truck. But undeniably, they had come to say good-bye.
Now we were returning a year later. The one desire I had had to listen from within a herd and to greet the Matriarchs formally had been met in Thula Thula and was unlikely again with such a large Elephant population. Earlier, our time in Chobe had confirmed the magical connections we had had there over the years. We accepted that we had been incorporated into a field of co-existence that made communication possible. Now I wondered what insights or messages might come from our next two destinations?
***
In a dry country, rain is luck. Abundant rains had come to Mashatu and were continuing. A pulley system helped us cross a swollen river where the year before we had driven across a dry ravine. Within minutes of going out on a first game drive, the winds picked up and we stopped the Land Rover to put ponchos on before the downpour. In an open vehicle without a roof we were as exposed to the elements as the animals. It was a good beginning.
The rain accompanied us intermittently until sunset as we drove across darkened and then brilliant yellow fields of devil’s thorn with which the female Elephants adorned themselves.
Accepting that we were not at Mashatu to repeat earlier experiences, confirm previous perceptions or gather new proofs of connection, we tried to look at everything with fresh eyes. It was Cyndie who first noticed the gestures of a herd of Elephants moving with great deliberation and intent into a small grove. We followed them curious. There they divided into little groups leaning against the trees, caressing them with their trunks but not eating the leaves. It can be nothing less than devotion, Cyndie said. We had not expected to come upon Elephants in prayer. But… why not?
Returning to the grove several times, we never encountered the Elephants there again. How empty it seemed without their presence converting it into a temple. Although we didn’t see them in prayer, we did come upon them blessing each other.
Beautiful and awesome as this was, I didn’t initially grasp what was being revealed. Anticipating relationship with the Elephants, or continuously hoping for it, I wasn’t aware of what was, in fact, occurring. In retrospect, stepping out of the confinement and limitation of individual events and examining them within a progression over years, writing this piece, seeing the photos again, I understand what I couldn’t then.
We were shown perfect beauty. We were shown … Creation. We were shown the spiritual lives of the Elephants and the animals. We were shown that we had been born into Paradise and had been exiled by our own hands.
Within minutes of driving out of the Camp the first morning, we were astonished by two turtle doves making love on a tree branch. A wondrous instance on a brilliant morning. Several minutes later, we came upon a terrapin in the road and our guide following his intuition looked into the underbrush about twenty feet away where two terrapins were mating. Spirit was getting our attention.
For the rest of the days at Mashatu we marveled at the profusion of life forms. There were newborn and young — Elephant, kudu, impala, zebra, wildebeest, cape buffalo, monkey, baboon, lion, giraffe … — everywhere.
And in Namibia, where we were to go next, even rhino calves.
As if to emphasize the message of fertility, everyone was mating. So it wasn’t a great surprise when we came upon an alpha lion we had seen the day before, sleeping under a tree while ten feet away, a young lioness, stirred restlessly. Unable to control her inner agitation, she approached the lion, circled him, prodded him until he stopped resisting her. What struck us was his kindness.
Our guide indicated that she was immature, had never had cubs, was overwhelmed with estrus. While the lion entered her, almost as if bidden, he did so gently, lowering his mouth to her shoulder to ease her before his thrust.
This sequence repeated again and again.
The last hour of the last day at Mashatu, we found a perch at the summit of a small hill that allowed us to look back toward the plain where we had been present as a great bull Elephant had been courting an Elephant matriarch before the entire herd. Then a startling shriek from a little one who resented the bull’s attention interrupted them and the bull strode away.
Behind us to the east, the herd was dispersing for the night. To the north, two Giraffes, their bodies rosy from the setting sun were standing, enchanted.
We could see that they wanted each other, though they were very still. Then he arched back in a parabola of desire and in seconds they mated in the purple dusk.
It was the last moment of the last day at Mashatu. Then the full moon rose.
We left the field of vision of fertility and creation for Damaraland in Namib, the oldest desert of the world. Here desert Elephants having adjusted to the environment and able to go without water for a few day are frequently born without tusks as a rapid genetic response to poaching. Last year, we saw a tuskless herd in the reserve and this year we were aware of many more tuskless Elephants among the others on the narrow oasis along a sand river where three very small herds sustain themselves.
As at Thula Thula, we were able to have some intimacy with the Elephants, following one and then another in their daily life. While we recognized individual conversations or connections as they occurred, it was only afterwards that I saw a pattern that could appropriately be acknowledged as interconnection. We were a small group, they were a small herd – we were with each other as distinct from observing each other. I was hoping to be able to see the Elephants and other species for themselves, independent of my own understanding. Over time, moments cohere into a Story, a field of vision, and it is the human task to see it for itself.
Thula Thula had prepared me for Damaraland though I didn’t know it at the time. The continuity of drought was an essential element. The abundance, even extravagance, of life forms at Chobe and Mashatu seemed to deny the grave danger of climate change caused by human activity, the on-going struggle for existence, the conflicts between the herders and the wild as a consequence of the lack of water and resources. In Damaraland, we remembered.
The bare but startling beauty of the landscape resembles the moon more than earth, and the Elephants themselves seem to have emerged from the land. In Damaraland as in Thula Thula, it became possible to focus on particular members of the herd. Following their lead when we came upon them, rather than our inclinations, we repeatedly found ourselves in the presence of a great bull Elephant. Only on our return home, at the airport in Frankfurt, did we realize that this great bull had dominated the landscape on the last day we had spent in Damaraland the year before. He had been posed like a sentinel on a rocky incline at the entrance to the lines of trees and desert springs along the sand river.
We had stayed with him for almost an hour, mesmerized. This year, the same; whenever he appeared, we gave ourselves up to him. Without acknowledging us, he silently directed us to stay and we did for long periods of time. The first day, we were parked below an earthen bank where a female was feeding on a tree when he appeared and displaced her. Though we remained with him, there was no indication that he was aware of or interested in us.
Again in our presence, the second day, he approached two young bulls who were trying to topple a tree. He advanced as an elder, demonstrated the right technique for grazing on trees and leaned against it so as to instruct them properly.
When they became rambunctious, he turned abruptly and left. We followed but he went off into the bush.
We were finding him an interesting bull Elephant, but on the third day he astounded us. Then we began to consider that something extraordinary was happening and we were, and were not, peripheral to the event.
We had spent a good part of the afternoon unsuccessfully tracking desert lions along the small dunes, always slightly behind the new footprints in the sand. Then we turned back to the sand river to look for Elephants. Pausing to determine our next move, we saw the Bull Elephant approach the hillock above us and we turned the truck to watch him.
He came slowly and determinedly, tore away some branches and threw them aside as if to extend the space. As was the case seventeen years earlier with the Ambassador, his actions seemed conscious and deliberate. To our astonishment, he then carefully eased his great weight down onto the sand and went to sleep, facing the direction of the lions and allowing his back to us.
Neither Cyndie, I, nor Matt, who had been Head Ranger and Head Photographic Ranger at the private South African game reserve, Mala Mala, had ever seen an Elephant lie down to sleep.
What was communicated?
Trust.
Accepting that direct communication and analysis came from the Elephant People allowed the field we were in together to become visible. We realized that we had been in ‘spirits’ theater for sixteen years, simultaneously actors and audience. Neither Elephant nor human could have designed such situations in which members of both species appear to each other as if explicitly summoned. While our meetings were both intentional and circumstantial, the sum total of our many interactions over time, hours, days, weeks, years, cohered in nested living stories that became the language through which we, different species though we are, spoke to each other. This occurred both within and outside of time and space. We had been transported to another dimension where meaning and action are simultaneous and indistinguishable. The story that emerged from and enfolded us challenged all conventional assumptions of reality and hegemony.
We had returned to the Elephants, again and again, at the behest of the Ambassador, and in return we were allowed to participate in a common field of consciousness that manifested unpredictably. Clearly both human and non-human were impacted by each other. Attuned to one another, we began to share a critical DNA of mind from which future connections and understandings would emerge. That is, we melted toward each other and, ultimately, without changing shape, we melted into each other.
And so we entered the last day. Toward the end of the afternoon before we would have to leave Damaraland, we again came across the bull whom I began calling The Great Elephant. He was waiting for us in the central island of the sand river.
We didn’t know he was waiting for us then, but I know it now. It has taken months to understand this, to see pattern and Story, too often hidden by time and doubt. A deeper understanding, one that encompasses all the years of engagement, beckons. Indigenous people knew this realm, this dimension beyond ours, this field of knowing and being where humans, non-humans, the spirits and earth co-exist beyond relationship.
The Great Elephant was waiting for us …
For the next hour or two, we followed him through the valley as he grazed or hid in the brush until he led us to the vast desert plain that all of us would cross at sundown. Just as night was falling, he would be on his way to a water tank set aside for the Elephants in return for the government digging wells for the Native people living there, and we would be returning to the Lodge.
Soon after we arrived, he left the tree where he had been waiting, turned east and meandered from place to place. At one point, he stopped, certain that we were watching though not glancing at us, and began to twist his trunk into a strange knot that I recognized as the gesture through which the Ambassador greeted us in 2000. He continued contorting his trunk while we observed, moved and mystified.
Finally, he unfolded his trunk, turned and went on.
Following him was complex. We had to be rigorous about not leading, finding a vantage point from which we could see without interfering or challenging him. When he stopped by a small tree, we were already directly in his path and he knew it. There were moments when we felt his love for the tree in the manner of the Elephants in Mashatu and we were simultaneously aware of his comedic threat to topple it upon us. Still, we remained quietly.
Sometimes when he approached, there was a divide between the Damaraland guide’s experience and training in caution and my own deep conviction that we were safe and needed to yield to the bull’s leadership not our fears.
So many minutes passed. It felt like hours or days. Soon he began walking again and we assumed he was leading us out of the valley toward the desert and the mountains.
But, unexpectedly, he entered a thicket and virtually disappeared. We waited and waited, agreeing among ourselves that we would wait no more than twenty more minutes. When the time was almost over, he emerged so dramatically he seemed angry to everyone in the truck. Believing we were completely safe, I begged them to be still and not startle him by turning on the engine. I had been speaking to him in my mind, explaining that this was our last night, actually our last hour, and had pleaded with him to come out as a sign or confirmation of the connection we were all feeling. And so, yes, he emerged.
There was no attack, no threat, nor had there been for all the time we had been with him over four days.
Now he ambled very slowly ahead of us down the stone-faced incline that was also masking the diminishing light. We might have thought he was oblivious to us if he had not defecated several times along the way. A sign of honor. Connection. (When Elephants meet after being separated, sometimes only for hours, they are overjoyed to be in each other’s company and this is expressed through pissing and defecating.)
I kept reminding our impatient guide, eager to return to the Lodge, to slow down and to wait. It was 7:30 and we were an hour late and tired. It was difficult to contain all the energies and stay parallel or behind the Great Elephant so that he could lead.
The Great Elephant came to the stony edge of the slope where the wide plain of the desert opened before us. He stopped. He pissed and defecated again. Not one of us had ever seen such frequency. Slowly, then, with utter presence, he proceeded up the rise and as he paused to spray himself with dust, he caught the exact and fleeting angle of the ruby light of the setting sun.
Then he went on, his footsteps, mysteriously filling with a sourceless light.
The Great Elephant looked back at us one last time.
An Elephant Ambassador came to meet us on January 6th, 2000, Epiphany. Now again, at the very last hour of the very last day, another such meeting.
A spirit? A messenger? An angel?
In the presence of the Great Mystery, it is best to remain wordless.
Deena Metzger has been writing for fifty years. Story is her medicine. Her latest novel, A Rain of Night Birds, a confrontation between indigenous knowledge and the modern scientific mind, bears witness: climate change arises from the same colonial mind that enacted genocide on the Native people of this country. It was published on Earth Day, April 22, 2017. Her other books include the novels La Negra y Blanca (2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature), Feral; Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems; Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing and Tree: Essays and Pieces.
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June 3, 2017
OUR MOTHER IS DYING – ECOCIDE
Ecocide.
So we are sitting with the Mother. Our Mother. She has been mortally wounded. We are at Her bedside. You know this place. We wonder if She can recover or if She will die. One way or another we have to be with Her. We can’t just hire a nurse or a technician to be with Her. We can’t leave Her in the hands of anonymous physicians who cannot possibly understand the full story of Her terrible illness. We seek advice, yes but we must be with Her and bring healing to every aspect of Her pain and suffering. If She is going to heal it will be because we are with Her each critical moment.
We are a large family and we all gather so we can bring all our gifts. Some of our siblings did research and found out what is poisoning Her, what adverse side-effects of Her / our lives are taking Her down. We stopped the poisoners. Some of our siblings found out who was beating Her and wounding Her. We stopped them too. Some of us discovered those who are plotting against Her and we are stopping them cold.
We are also gathering the community to sit with Her. We sit with Her day and night. Some of us drum and sing to Her. Some of us make her laugh, Some of us pray and do ceremony, day and night. Some of us wash her body and ease her broken body Some of us bring her food and drink, what will nurture her. Some of us ease her fevers.
Some of us tell stories so she will remember and the memory of how she lived once, how we lived together will revive her, We take her outside, We bring her to the trees and the animals. She feels the wind blowing again. We bring her to the living waters and immerse her. We sit her before the sacred fires. Each action helps her toward health.
Somehow our lives change and become about being with our Mother full time so she can rally. We take turns but she is never alone, never without her family, never without those who love her. Not any one of us is away more than a day or two and even then we are always with her. We discover, this is a good way to live.
This is what I mean:
This news about Trump and the other criminal murderers – can’t go the way of other headlines and news bulletins, We can’t succumb to distraction, the next obligation or the next emergency.
She, our Mother, is who we must attend, no matter what else, every moment of Her/our lives. This pis the conundrum – Our Mother is dying and if she dies we die too. No one will survive Her dying, No one and no thing.
So we gather at her bedside. All of us. All the children and the grandchildren and the great grandchildren
And we do our work of changing the climate, which is killing Her and restoring a climate in which She can survive.
And we do it ceaselessly. 24/7. 365 days. For millennia, if necessary.
Nothing else matters. If She dies, we die and our children die. All beings die.
If She lives, then there will be life.
That simple.
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June 2, 2017
We Will Not Commit Ecocide
Mr. Trump has crossed the line. He has committed a grave criminal act. I will not cross that line.
Mr. Trump is a criminal. Mr. Trump is committing ecocide which is murder times the number of living beings on the planet. There is no greater crime possible and his actions will not be tolerated.
Mr. Trump cannot prevent me, can not prevent any one of us individually from adhering to the Paris Climate Accords. He cannot because I will not / we will not commit ecocide. Because I will not / we will not murder the Mother.
If he burns coal, we will not use it. If he releases carbon, we will rebury it in the earth. If he poisons, we will transform it to nectar. We will not steal from the future. We will not covet the resources that belong to all beings.
We will protect the earth, we will protect the future.
When I am lost or confused without knowing what to do, I will plant trees and like the true elders on this planet we will listen to the spirits, we will pray and do ceremony and we will stand with water.
I have to repeat this. We will not commit ecocide. We will not murder the Mother. There will be a future for all beings. The earth will be protected and restored. Mitakuye oyasin
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April 24, 2017
This Earth Day, Let’s Not Forget the Long Environmental Plight of Native Americans
From uranium mining in the Four Corners to the Hanford nuclear site, the U.S. government has consistently treated First Peoples’ land with disregard.[image error]
Uranium mine tailings clean-up near Moab, Utah.
Photo Credit: Gary Whitton/Shutterstock
In March 2008, a small group of medicine people, healers and health professionals accompanied a native woman back to the Four Corners Reservation in Arizona after 22 years of self-exile. She had been suffering from leukemia, and then kidney failure from chemo, as a result of unknowingly playing in uranium tailings as a child. Yet she was healing despite stopping chemo, and she knew enough from her tradition that physical healing depends also on spiritual and soul healing, and so the journey was arranged.
The first morning in Tuba City, Arizona, we were surprised to meet members of the U.S. Geological Survey team who were looking to discover hidden uranium tailings poisoning the waters. As it happened, the woman had such information from her childhood, and in turn the survey team directed us to a private back road so that from above, we could view the now covered pit where she had played.
It was an extraordinary visit and significant for each of us in different ways. I was deeply rattled at the very beginning when we stopped at midnight at the entrance to the reservation in the tiny town of Cameron. We wanted to approach this homecoming with formal respect. It was necessary to do ceremony. We exited from the cars although it was bitter cold, and I bent down to touch the earth. Running my fingers through the sand, I was astonished to find they were hot. Cameron had been a major mining and storage site for uranium, but uranium is not hot. Nevertheless, on this cold night in March in Arizona, the sands were hot.
I could not forget that moment. It persisted in my thinking for years. In 2011, I began writing a novel, A Rain of Night Birds, about two climatologists, one native and one non-native, who upon meeting each other had to face the emotional and spiritual anguish of their profession. Unsurprisingly, the non-native woman goes to Cameron and discovers that the sands are hot. Her professional training doesn’t help her solve the mystery, but she pays respect to the profoundly wounded earth.
Writing a novel is a mysterious process. Fiction requires the bedrock of truth to be of value and truth requires fiction to translate its deepest meanings and implications. When I was writing the novel, I found myself seeking the bedrock through which the story of the characters’ love for each other and their anguish for the world would be revealed. In October 2013, I visited the Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center Museum and was captivated by the First Peoples exhibit on the history of the original people who lived in the area of the Gorge.
Like the burning sands of Cameron, I could not forget these First People. I was also puzzled by the focus of the museum, at once on the First Peoples and their ways of life, myths and wisdom, and also on the local history of transportation in the modern era. It is a disconcerting juxtaposition of soul and steel. The next August, I had to return; the Columbia Gorge and the Four Corners Reservation were becoming important sites in my novel. I had two visits in mind: the first to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the second to the Yakama Reservation.
The U.S. government has the audacity to call Hanford a “reservation” after expropriating Lalik (Rattlesnake Mountain), sacred to the Yakama, for use by the Manhattan Project, which built the B Reactor, the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world, which made Fat Man, the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. Hanford is decommissioned now, but it cannot be cleaned up. It is one of the 10 most toxic sites in the world and the most toxic in the United States. It affects the entire Columbia River and its watershed.
[image error]
Aerial view of the 100-B Area with Reactor B, the first large-scale nuclear reactor ever built. (image: Everett Historical/Shutterstock)
When my traveling companion and I applied for reservations for the tour of Hanford, we were told they were sold out until 2012. But the day before we left for the Northwest, two tickets became available, so we took the tour into hell. The following day, we met with Russell Jim, an elder of the Yakama Nation, head of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Indian Nation’s Environmental Restoration and Waste Management Program.
Jim spoke with us about the devastation of the land, how it is affecting the Yakama Nation and about the environmental impact of the radioisotopes that were released into the areas surrounding the B Reactor and the other nuclear reactors aligning the Columbia River. He spoke of the radiant salmon hanging to dry on the porches of the local people, and the radiation experiments enacted on non-consensual local natives. “But we will not leave our way of life,” he said. He was determined that his people would not become like the conquerors, or like those who created Hanford and nuclear bombs.
At its best, literature allows the reader to enter another world and experience another being’s life. In order for this to come about, the writer herself must enter the reality fully. In 1977, I had breast cancer. In 2008, I put my hands on the earth on the Four Corners Reservation and discovered the sands were hot. In March 2011, at the time of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, I lay down in my imagination within the body of the Earth Sea Mother to feel the radiation burn she cannot escape. On Aug. 11, 2014, I took the public tour of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation where an accidental release of a plume of radiation burned into my body, evidenced by extreme C-reactive protein levels that took months to cool. For the next years I lived in the body of my imagination or the imagination of my body or both of the realities of the two climatologists whose lives I was coming to know and chronicle in my novel.
We will not survive as people or as a planet if we do not learn each other’s reality in every cell of our bodies. We will not survive if we do not look unflinchingly at the grave harm we are doing. Empathy and the willingness to experience common jeopardy may help us heal our psychotic condition. Writing this on April 6, 2017, I learn that our infantile and demented president has sent 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles onto the bleeding soil of Syria. This Earth Day, I offer you an excerpt from A Rain of Night Birds. May our Earth Mother survive us, somehow.
September, 2007, Canyon de Chelly. It was just weeks since Terrence had collapsed. As they drove in the long about way she and her father favored through Cameron, Tuba City, Kayenta, Many Farms to Chinle, Sandra’s thoughts inevitably flitted to the earlier trip. She had never gained an understanding of the hot sands. She couldn’t set it entirely aside because she believed that Terrence had buckled when he penetrated, with his piercing eyes, the history that led to the contamination of sacred land at Hanford Nuclear Reservation. He had looked through Wy’east (Mt Hood) to see it, in the way he had looked at the 2007 IPPC report through the wide-angle multidimensional lens of his mind.
Alone at Massacre Cave Outlook, where the brutal Kit Carson and his men had slaughtered mostly women and children in order to eradicate the Diné, the sands dribbled back into her consciousness. Terrence’s precarious condition had seemingly allowed her to set aside the entire spectrum of ills from the Anthropocene – from war to the poisoned earth – to focus on him. And also his condition had raised her alarm to orange alert. Worried about him, she turned away from the hot sands, but she could not forget them when standing at Adah Aho’doo’nili (Two Fell Off).
She could see into the earth to its fiery core and as far as the sun, as he could see forward and back seven generations and widely to the origin of the wind, its destination and return, to the swirl of currents, rising and falling, emerging and diminishing, an unending circle encompassing the globe.
Now she – so much had they become one – had to hold alongside Terrence’s collapse looking at Hanford, the inescapable fact, though she did not understand it, that the sands at Cameron had been hot at midnight on a cold March night, 2005, just before the advent of the spring equinox.
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