Page 33 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

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.