SPEAKING COMMON LANGUAGES:

She did not doubt that the non-humans might communicate, species to species, in languages they devised. In her experience, the animals had often been the instigators. They carefully developed language forms so that the humans would understand their meaning.…

It seemed as if they were encouraging her on her quest or commenting upon it and it was just this – a sense of connection – amazing, incomprehensible, and real, yes real – that mattered so much. Everything was connected to everything else, and everything the water, the beauty, the poison, the humans, the Dolphin, the Sheep had to be considered. Their appearance implied the possibility of strange alliances between humans and the more than humans, between one world and another…. It had to mean something about the coexistence and intersections of worlds which implied that the transformation of this broken world was not out of the question, was not out of the questions she was asking.

From, Deena Metzger’s Broken Lambs, forthcoming.

We were seated in a circle on the patio. Friends for many, many years we were now living on different coasts and so together for the first time since Covid, we quickly fell into the conversation we all longed for. “What have you been thinking?” we asked each other, pining for the deep dive that had so often occurred between us but required being in each other’s presence.

As often happens, I was surprised by what I heard myself saying. I had not voiced it before to others or even to myself. “I think,” I said, “that even those of us who love Earth and the natural world so much, and are fully aware of the grave dangers that exist to all life, have betrayed her.” I was also speaking about myself. My friend waited for me to elaborate, and so I continued, “Given that we know that we can’t survive when the natural world isn’t thriving, and that we know its wonders, and also given that we know that our contemporary way of life is a violent attack, actually a war, on the natural world, it would be reasonable to live every moment of our lives in profound relationship, opposing, altering, refusing to participate in what does such harm consistently, and devoting ourselves to healing these conditions. But we are distracted by our own lives, and their preoccupation with social media and so become increasingly petty and mindless. We pay attention here and there, for a weekend, or a workshop, or an hour here or there, but it is not how we live on a daily basis.” I felt the truth, the grief, the shame of it. It also became clear that being detached from the ways of the natural world disconnected us from its wisdom and has led to the grim deterioration of the life force. I do not need to list here the assaults on land, oceans, rivers, ice, air, the droughts, wildfires and floods, the extremes of pollution and toxicity, global heating and the fast path toward extinction.

When we met the next day and considered how we might spend this precious time, we felt the call to Journey and to ask spirit what in fact we are called to be and how we can meet our sacred obligation to the Earth.

The Journey took me to two moments in my life that then repeated and repeated. Or rather, I was taken back to two extraordinary moments in my life and I was embedded in them again and again until the experience of ordinary life fell away and I was entirely engaged in the wonder and honor of those encounters.

The first was my meeting with the Elephant Ambassador on January 6^th 1999. Standing at the back of a pick-up truck which was parked across from a stream in Chobe, National Park, Botswana. I watched a bull Elephant make his slow and deliberate way toward me until he was directly before me, close enough to embrace me with his trunk, and we remained this way, eye to eye, heart to heart, for 30 minutes.

The second was my meeting with Frankie, the Elephant Matriarch in Training at Thula Thula, South Africa, who came to meet me where I waited in an open safari vehicle. I waited quietly as she made her slow way, guiding the herd, toward me and my companions. When we were very near to each other, her large, curved tusks pointing toward us, she stopped and waited while I introduced myself and the others to her, asking permission to be there, as I would have done on a first meeting with an Indigenous Elder or Chief.

When I finished speaking from my heart to hers, she turned, aware that we were following, and led her people (and us) to a grove of Marula trees, heavily laden with fruit. (To read about these in greater detail, see my novel, La Vieja: A Journal of Fire. I am planning to offer a chapter a month as a bonus for paid subscribers. TBA)

What I took from the journey was that the Elephants had actually come to me, initiating peaceful contact again and again. Then I understood that I was being reminded that I / we live in a world of unquestionable animal intelligence and intent. I was re-experiencing again and again the wonder of being in such a profound relationship with another species. In those moments, the animals, the Elephants in these situations, invite the humans into their realm, into a world of awe, beyond the limitations of the human alone. I was to remember and repeatedly live within that memory in order to know how to live in the world so that my actions arise from this knowing.

This is the conclusion: We have each had experiences in the natural world which are filled with the marvelous, which have been so extraordinary we have almost doubted them. Experiences which demand that we expand our thinking and our assumptions about reality. As a consequence, I ask you to hold these questions:

What is the true nature of the world in which such things happen?

And, how then, shall we live?

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This site is now #9 in Climate and Environment. This is because WE are devoted to Earth and the natural world and WE are engaged in finding the ways to prevent extinction and to restore creation. I thank you from my broken but determined heart for being in alliance with all beings on behalf of a true and vital future for all, and seeing the possibilities of restoration and living accordingly.

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As of the morning of August 14th, this Substack is now #2 in Climate and Environment.

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