BUSH SERMONS TO SURVIVE THE PANDEMIC

Gavin Hartford contrasts the survival patterns of the herd with humans’ celebration of individuality

It starts like this. We sleep in a glass box. The box lies beneath a blanket of stars. The stars are always there because the nights are always clear. The Milky Way watches us. That’s all we see. Night after night. But there’s more. We know the Milky Way to be one among thousands of galaxies in our small corner of the universe. Part of the super cluster of galaxies named Laniakea, a Hawaiian word meaning “immeasurable heaven”. It feels like that when I gaze at the heavens above. Stars and planets and more stars. Some dancing and blinking bright; others dull, sentry-like and upright. Each holding its own. None crowding out the other. Space creation. Feels like social distancing in the time of Covid-19. Staying safe for each other. Expanding from one another. That’s what is written into the language of the stars. That’s what I see. There is presence and distance in the heavens above me.

Each morning the glass box is opened wide up, as the last stars disappear, an hour before dawn. The day seeps in slowly from the east carrying its clean, crisp, winter air into our box wrapped in a soft pale light. And with this first light comes the calls of the Egyptian goose, the Natal spurfowl, the fish eagle, the greenshank and brown-hooded kingfisher. Countless bird calls fill the air. I know them well. I have learnt their song and their symphony — the multiple tones and melodies. I lie and listen. Close my eyes once more and listen again. In the darkness from behind my eyelids the bird calls reverberate like a distant echo. An echo resounding back from millions of bygone years, from the end of the Jurassic period, from the time of the dinosaurs, reminding me of my evolutionary place in the ancestral line. A timeline that roots me to the smallness of me, the insignificance of my life in the tapestry of all life, through the passage of all time. They’re my leveller, my great corrector, those bird calls. It’s so settling. That big thought. The sound of bird calls travelling through eons of time to reach me. And of course not just me but all the ancient species about me — the bushbuck, impala, kudu, to name a few. “We are who we are through others” I think. Not just our hominid others. But all others. All living species, through all the history of time.

There is my ancestral heritage encoded into the bird songs that come to me.

Irise. Every day I walk in the bush and visit the same shrubs and trees to hear their wisdom. I stand among them. Listening to them breathe. Watching their changes. They teach patience and acceptance of everlasting change. The lessons are carried in their trunks and branches and leaves. In the way they occupy a certain space and make it their own. The way they stand. Steadfast. Projecting a message of presence, just like the stars. The way they give of themselves to the seasons: their inner green evolving to an outer red and yellow and finally grey. The way they undress themselves so acceptingly, so inevitably, so willingly, without a shadow of expectation or disappointment. Give of themselves to the earth. Carpet the floor of the earth with their foliage. Dust to dust. To be the home of the dung beetle, or earthworm or ant. They are the masters of acceptance of everything, including and especially their fate. They are the very monuments to peace with the way things are: without retort, without anger, without judgment, without demands or expectation or hope even. The wisdom of their ways is soft-spoken and subtle, yet so clear, so visible. It’s in the physicality of their trunk, branch and leaf. It’s in the changes of the seasons. It’s in the language of the dialectic, of seeking sustenance from and returning sustenance to the soil. I kneel before their wisdom and learn peace and resolve.

There is acceptance of the cycle of life in the trees that speak to me.

The days shorten. Summer abundance becomes winter aridness. This transition marks the time of the impala rut. Before us are herd upon herd of impala does. Inside each herd of does struts a singleminded, stressed out, ram.

The relentless battle to hold and service the harem is the way the natural world filters the strongest genes from one generation to the next. It has worked well for the impala. They are ubiquitous over the savanna plains. They have been here for six million years. Supremely evolved and adapted. Browsers and grazers. Taking sustenance from their own placenta during droughts. And yet, capable of holding unborn young to await the green sprouts of the summer rains, before dropping the next generation to the earth. There is struggle and adaption for survival of the species before me.

This is the animal kingdom. The crash of buffalos, tower of giraffes, coalition of lions, dazzle of zebras, pack of painted dogs. Multiple families of the animal kingdom. Each member dependent on the other. Doing together the family survival work of eat, drink, procreate and protect one another. The stallion defending the harem; the matriarchs commanding the elephant breeding herd or hyena pack. Survival here is forged from coalitions, cooperation and adaption. There is no individualism, no ego, no judgment, no ruthless inequality of us and them. Here alliances and equity are paramount, despite ranking. Conflict is contained, ring-fenced, within the confines of the greater good of the survival of the species. Collectivism is embedded in the DNA of all species.

All species, except us. We alone celebrate individual triumph above and beyond the collective as desirable, as success, even. We alone murder and maim each other and our planet. And we do this knowing, as Madiba taught, that one hand washes the other, that the bird makes its nest with another bird’s feathers, that we are who we are through others.

There is a marching call of ubuntu rising within me: for each one to teach one; for each one to keep one — for peace and equity amongst our human family.