MEDITATING WITH RHINOS

South African born screenwriter Helena Kriel finds herself in a deep personal crisis, forced to ask: Where do I belong? Who do I belong with? What is family?

What is tribe? Where is home?

The memoir opens in Los Angeles, where she’s an A-list screenwriter, married to the man she thought was “The One”. When the writers’ strike renders her useless and her marriage falls apart, she travels back to her childhood home in South Africa. Little does Helena now that she’ll find her salvation in the heart of the South African bush as she volunteers to work with baby rhinos, orphaned by poaching. The rhinos have also lost belonging and family, they are shattered by the violence of their circumstance. Using

meditation, Helena finds she can access these sentient and emotional beings. They

inspire her broken self to look for a connection to all of nature. Helena ultimately finds her sense of belonging and learns from the rhinos that “You grow where life puts you down”.

Here is an extract.

HELENA is introduced to a newly arrived baby rhino who is traumatised. She has volunteered to meditate with him, to perhaps bring him some peace. Helena is taken into the night-pen. She has no experience with rhinos but is given the chance to sit with him. She is very nervous, but thrilled to be given this opportunity.

Sam opens the night-pen door and invites me in. And there he is: the young rhino lying up against the wall with a fixed eye. Sam has a milk bottle and he enters the night-pen with it. I stand behind him, watching.

“Okay, let’s see how this goes,” he says.

Has this experiment worked? Is it vaguely possible that this traumatised youngster might take the milk bottle?

The young rhino stumbles up and Sam positions himself by his head, the bottle pointed to his mouth. We wait. The young rhino stands, confused, weighing up his options, which are few. He faces Sam. Sam puts the teat to his mouth. The rhino doesn’t budge. Sam tries to open his lips, but the calf tosses his head to the side. His mouth is set into a hard line. Sam sighs. I close my eyes and through my heart, I conjure images of him opening his mouth and tasting the milk. I communicate how warm and sweet it is. I communicate: this is your mother! And then I hear Sam saying: “Fantastic! Breakthrough!”

I open my eyes. The calf is drinking from the bottle. He tries the milk; it’s evidently very nice, and he drinks the milk dry, then satisfied he waits in a bit of a milk daze, swaying on his legs, before he settles back down with a deep sigh grunt.

“Breakthrough! Total breakthrough!” Sam is celebrating. He turns to me.

“He needs company. Have you ever done this before?”

“No.”

He weighs this up. They’re short on staff, and this rhino should not be alone. “Are you up for staying with him?”

“Yes, of course!”

“All you have to do, when he gets up, ’cause he will get up, is position yourself by the shoulder. Never place yourself in front of him.”

It sounds straightforward. Sort of. “And don’t let him step on your feet ’cause he’s heavy, and you’re not wearing boots.”

I look down. Sam’s boots are big and heavy, my sneakers are muddy and insubstantial.

“Just be vigilant, concentrate, keep by his shoulder, watch out for his feet and you’ll be fine. Just be mindful. ” I am not convinced.

But the opportunity.

That I am being trusted at all! That I am with a wild, confused being, a baby rhino! Of course I am up for it, whatever and however, and even if he stands on my feet.

Sam closes me into the night-pen, and I am suddenly alone in here, in the semidark with a young rhino lying at my feet. The night-pen is small, with hay on the floor to keep him comfortable. Both doors, front and back, are closed, and the afternoon slices in horizontally through the slats, patterning the wall and the rhino in coruscating lines of light. I breathe in and out slowly, attempting to calm myself and perhaps him. He is settled. I don’t want to disturb him by changing my position on the straw. The last thing I want is him blundering up in chaos and throwing himself around in here! I am so nervous. Do I dare sit down quietly by his side? The milk has soothed him, he is dozing, with his eyes half open. Like a Tai Chi practitioner, I bring myself, very slowly, to a seated position near him so he can feel me, a body, some warmth, to penetrate his aloneness. There’s just enough room for me and the rhino to be together and there’s just enough room for us to move around. Maybe even for him to turn.

That’s about it.

I sit on the straw. Mindful, Sam’s word, the Buddhist word.

Mindful. I know that means keeping the mind on the present, on the one-pointed moment at play. Mindful is finding the concentration to just be here. Now. It’s everything I have not been able to do of late. But, it is so easy to be here, now. I don’t want to be anywhere else, but closed into the semi-dark, away from the afternoon, with this young rhino. There is nowhere else to be but here.

I am aware of the privilege, not questioning my place in it, and wanting only to make it a bit better for him, gentler than the madness of his life over the last few days. He is asleep, eyes closed, breathing regular. I sit beside him. It seems peaceful. I lay my hand on his body. He doesn’t flinch or show any kind of resistance. Once I am sure that he is okay with the pressure of my hand on him, I run my hands up and down his body. His hide is wrinkled, leathery. I can smell him and he smells of animal, of outside; it’s thick and deep, a smell of must and mud, half sweet, half salty. I breathe in deep, taking him in.

He must like the touch, because he gives me a little more access by shifting his back legs open, exposing the area between his legs, his groin, and I see he is covered in ticks, a thick, black layer, clumped one on another, across his genitals and down his legs. There are hundreds of them, engorging on his blood. I have a dog in a tick area in Topanga. Sometimes, in a bad summer, I will pick twenty ticks off my dog after a hike. But this is countless hundreds. I have never seen this many engorged ticks. The sight is shocking. I am contemplating these ticks when he blunders up! All peace is broken, he is in chaos. I stumble up.

Shoulder, keep to the shoulder. Don’t let his head face you. Be careful of your feet.

Sam’s instructions.

Okay. I fumble, positioning myself by his shoulder. He moves, trying to understand the geography of this tiny space, going forward, back, only to be confronted by walls. Before, he had endless space: the bush, stretching rumpled to all horizons, nothing to halt his movement, trees, a crocodile-infested lake, all the elements of his young, known world. But now there is nothing known. It’s all foreign, straight, no curves. There is no rising sun to warm him after a long, cool night. No noon-day heat to beat along his back, turning his hide to a slow burn. There is no muddy wallow to sink down into and heave from side to side, cooling the day’s burn. There is no stroking of long grass, or the sound of the summer birds in thickets. There is no smell of elephants lumbering through, low rumblings to one another causing vibration under his feet. There is no hustle and joust with another baby rhino. There is no familiar smell of the rhino midden, with all the scents of friends near and far, come to relieve themselves and leave each other messages. There is no cool sand to lie down in. There is no mother rhino’s horn to gently poke the way. There is no mother’s big and hefty side to lean against. No mother’s pounding heart to measure the beat of the world in. There is no incremental movement of the sun from horizon to horizon.

Instead he has me, this panicked and confused human who has positioned herself, cemented to his shoulder, and the cold hard walls that confront him, the bounce of hay beneath his feet. He blunders from side to side, anxious and squeaking, bleating and calling for his mother.

¡ Meditating with Rhinos is published by Melinda Ferguson Books, which is an imprint of NB Publishers and retails for R260.