Page 32 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

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hunted in suburbia and wrote a novel, What Rough Beast, (unpublished) from a Lion’s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.

[https://deenametzger.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/beginning-awareness-approaching-

the-Elephant-people-part-i-thula-thula-and-chobe/]

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