Out of Africa Series
“Make nature your best teacher. With great love, learn from her the lessons of life.”
~ Debasish Mridha
What is the “Out of Africa” series?
My first teacher was the African bushveld. I learned to be careful, watchful and observant of all around me so as to be safe as I explored, collecting many animals and reptiles, fish and insects as pets. I was encouraged to be adventuresome, to love what is wild, to see beauty and find my connection to all that lives wild and free. I was taught that what depends on me is my great responsibility and that their lives are in my safekeeping, whether this was silk worms, houseplants, or the many animals that found their way into my parents home. I was taught that everything teaches me something about myself. And so, I pass on a few of my learnings, from Africa to you in the hopes that you too, learn to see the many lessons inherent in nature.
The Teachings (PDF Links):
Making Peace with your Ancestors
It’s Hard to breathe, sometimes in Africa
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Leprosy - The Importance of Pain
Dahabi the Camel or How the Camel Got its Hump
Will you be my Mama - Kolobe the Little Warthog
Camp Xakanaxa - October 2023 - Presence
Camp Xakanaxa - October 2023 - Interdependence
The Silk Worm
The Stupid Hippo
On our recent trip to the Okavango Delta in Botswana, we had a guide called Coca, who knew wildlife better than any guide I have ever encountered.... and he had a marvelous sense of humor about the animals and human nature. One morning he pointed out to us a track leading down to the river and commented, “Hippo Highway.” We looked at him enquiringly, knowing there was more to come. “You can see there are two tracks because hippos do not cross over their legs. Their left front leg and their left back leg go in the same track and their right front leg and back leg go on the other track - and every day they go the same way. They are very stupid! And you will ask me now, ‘How is the hippo very stupid?’ So I will tell you how the hippo is very stupid…… for more click here.
A Lesson in Uncluttering
When I was a little girl my parents had a rule that before Christmas we had to sort through all our toys and choose one or two that we really loved and wanted to keep. All the rest were boxed up and taken to the orphanage for children that didn’t have any toys. We were told that unless we did this Santa would not be bringing any new toys to us. ! There was a tinge of clinging to some things but mostly there was the “feel good,” idea of some other little kid enjoying something that I had given them that predominated. This ritual of tidying and organizing was celebratory and exciting (especially for my Mom - and it was catching!) If anything I felt a twinge of guilt for not giving my most favorite toy - because if it was my favorite then surely it would give some little girl more pleasure than the things I was giving away…..for more click here.
Brooding on Potential
When I was a child I raised chickens in the backyard. There were the good layers like the rangy, white leghorns, the big round Rhode Island Reds, the shiny black Australorps, and a mean old rooster who ruled his kingdom ferociously, flying at me and my sister with long ripping spurs if we dared enter his domain. We also had bantams and one of them was a sweet little red hen that was perpetually broody and spent her entire life sitting on eggs. She was such a good little mother that we would take eggs from the bigger hens and put them under her to hatch them……for more click here.
Learning to See
I was filled with all the bravado of an insecure thirteen year old, determined to prove herself capable of doing what everyone had said she was not old enough to do. I wanted to work in the hospital. I was going to be a missionary Doctor. What finer calling could there be, than to serve God, save Africa’s starving children, be a political activist and be as beautiful and noble as Katherine Hepburn in the movie, “The Nun’s Story?”
Click here to continue reading.
Elephant Wisdom
A few years ago I was sitting at a watering hole in the Addo National Park in South Africa watching a herd of elephants. The banks of the pan were slippery red clay. As I watched. a little baby elephant reached for the water with his trunk and his front legs started slipping down the bank. He tried frantically to scramble back up. It was to no avail and he slid into the water up to his shoulders! His mother was clearly a little distressed and all the aunty elephants started milling restlessly around as they watched the infant try to pull himself back up the bank….for more click here.
Processing Feelings
I was recently on safari in Africa. The bush veld is a wild, primeval place where you are either the hunter or the hunted. There is a savage, harsh beauty to the land and yet there is no place on earth that I feel a greater sense of tranquility. Death and violence erupts suddenly and is quickly over and then peace reigns again as if nothing really happened…..for more click here.
Chameleon
Apart from the mock hissing and attempted roaring that chameleons make when you pick them up, they could not be less like lions, even though their name means ‘Earth Lion.’ The ones I collected as a child lived a lurking existence in bushes and trees where they would sit dead still for long periods of time, the pigment of their skin adapting to their environment, camouflaging them from predators. They would move cautiously and very slowly, their round bodies kind of wobbling on the thin spindly little legs that clutched the branch. As they crept forward they would lift one foot, pausing to gain their balance, move it forward to grasp the branch and then, after a pause, lift the next foot, all the time scanning their environment with their rotating eyes - each one spinning slowly around, 360 degrees, in different directions. The chameleon gets agitated, stressed and very anxious in the presence of other chameleons, as if it doesn’t quite know how to relate. Chameleons although they belong to the lizard family, do not have the speed of their cousins. Their legs barely seem able to support them, and so they have to rely on other survival skills…..for more click here.
The Spider
I grew up in Zimbabwe, which has several hundred species of spiders – some of them, dangerous to humans. Most of my time as a child was spent in the veld or the garden where it was imperative to be alert and attentive to the animals, reptiles, insects and spiders for which one should have a healthy respect. Spiders are particularly intriguing. Their venom can either affect the neural system or cause damage to tissue at the place of the bite. Some are perfectly harmless and make intriguing pets. It is important to know the difference. Sometimes the most seemingly intimidating are really quite harmless to humans, like the big hairy tarantulas, and some are deadly like the tiny, pretty black widow spider. But most intriguing are the ones that spin elaborate, elegant silk webs – perfect mandalas of incredible strength and beauty, glistening in the sunlight. On a cool summer morning when the underbrush was still dewy I would watch how little insects would fly into the web and find themselves trapped on the sticky substance on the web. The spider would then rush out to devour it – and not get stuck in it’s own web! How amazing! The trick is that the spokes of the web are not covered in sticky glandular secretions – only the parts going around and around do – but only the spider knows this…..for more click here.
Sing Your Song
In the early 1980’s, I worked with a man called Sandy D’Oliviera. He was involved in introducing the Laubach system of literacy to underprivileged people in South Africa and I was involved in grass roots community development with rural Black South Africans for whom there was an 80% illiteracy rate. It was in the context of my job that I met with him as a resource for the people with whom I was working. He was then a man in his seventies. He had a large balding dome of a head that had once sported sandy colored hair – hence the name – a large roman nose, a twinkling smile and quiet sense of humor. He related to the poor and disenfranchised differently to other South Africans. He was lacking the usual paternalistic, condescending, do-gooder attitude of most so-called humanitarians offering aid. The people loved and revered him and he tackled the task of literacy with an unusual intensity and passion. I asked him about his great love for the work he was doing….
For more … click here
Listen! Listen carefully.
Beneath the distraction of superficiality and materialism
You will hear the scream.
The scream of a soul imprisoned
Wanting expression,
Wanting to sing with abandon, to dance freely and wildly,
to live and breathe the beauty of creation
Ignored, rejected, spurned, and allocated to the dark recesses of existence
The soul is screaming for freedom
Listen! Listen carefully and find your Real Voice.
Seals and Terrorists - Processing Anger and Self Righteousness
“The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.”
~ Rumi
During our last retreat to South Africa we went swimming and snorkeling with seals. We all got dressed in our wetsuits, collected our snorkels and goggles and took off for the rubber raft that would take us out to the Robberg peninsula which is home to a colony of 5000 Cape fur seals.
As always I had encouraged our group to engage the South Africans in conversation, show interest and be bridge builders in the world. One of our group asked one of the guides, a beautiful blonde California surfing type guy, bronzed and built, whether he had ever been to America. When he replied, “no,” she asked if he would like to? He replied, “I have heard New York is the land of Sodom and I have no wish to go to a country that legitimizes homosexuality.” End of conversation. Shocked and hurt by the response, our young retreatant came and told me about the conversation that seemingly ended all possibility of connection or relationship. Or did it?…….For more click here.
It is Hard to Breathe, sometimes, in Africa
It is hard to breathe, sometimes, in Africa,
when the stench of milky sewage seeps in rivulets down the eroded dirt of the hillside
from the lean-to tin and wooden-slatted shanty shack
clinging precariously to the side of the mountain.
For more … Read here
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
The story of South Africa, and my story as a South African, is a story about victims and perpetrators at a social level. It is also the story of humankind at an individual and very personal level. But this is only part of the story. Ultimately it is a story of liberation, healing and freedom - of transcending the paradigm of oppression and suffering. My hope is that you will find many similari7es to my story in your own personal lives and the social climate you find yourselves in today. For more … Read here
The Rainbow Nation – A Land of Tears
I have just returned from the World Parliament of Religions. One of the sessions I attended was about a youth program in Cape Town, lead by an energetic, confident young white woman of privilege whose father was an Anglican priest and a Colored woman Anglican priest from the Cape Flats – an area of relocation, destitution and deprivation. The Cape Flats are where Colored people were relocated and forcibly removed from what was deemed White areas, during the apartheid era. These two women have the vision, the commitment and the dedication to work towards reconciliation, unity and equality in their land through helping the youth have dialogue across racial, ethnic and religious barriers. The young woman talked about being arrested and being in demonstrations in which the police threw tear gas as she has protested the ongoing racial disparity at the University of Cape Town. Forty years ago my sister was one of those students being thrown into the back of a paddy wagonand hauled off to jail, for the very same reason. It left me wondering, has their actually been any progress, despite the very best efforts by people of vision, like these two women.
Mother Love
I was an unruly and wild seven year old. My mother loves to tell me that the antics I got up to as a child turned her prematurely grey. I was at a birthday party. The mothers of the children were inside drinking tea together while us kids were playing a riotous game of tag in the backyard. I was being chased. In a split second I realized, too late, that I was running so fast towards a tall , thick and ancient hawthorn hedge that I was not going to be able to stop in time. I put my hands out in front of me to protect myself from slamming into the hedge.
Leprosy - The Importance of Pain
“Leprosy also known as Hansen disease named after a Norwegian physician Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen who identified the causative organism in 1873, is a skin and nerve infection caused by Mycobacterium leprae. Since biblical times, the disease continues to be an important cause of peripheral neuropathy, disability and disfigurement [1]. Worldwide, 2 million people are estimated to be disabled by leprosy. In 2010, 228 474 new cases were detected and the worldwide registered prevalence was 192 246 cases [2,3]. Word Health Organisation (WHO) targeted leprosy as one of the diseases to be eliminated from the world as a public health problem by reducing the prevalence to less than 1 case per 10,000 population based on the use of multi-drug therapy (MDT). Despite the success of MDT, endemic pools still exist in some countries that attained the national elimination threshold [3-5].
Malawi attained the WHO leprosy elimination status in 1994. Nationally, it still maintains this status where in 2010 the country registered a total of 632 leprosy cases out of 14 million people, representing 0.5 cases per 10,000 population.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3492035/
Dahabi the Camel or How The Camel Got It’s Hump
All the animals were gathered at the market place patiently waiting under a huge, old date palm for their human’s to return from trading and bickering with one another. It was hot and tiring and as always when one gets tired and hungry, the animals were getting irritable. And as always when one gets irritable and impatient one tends to behave badly and pick on other people. There was a young camel called Dahabi (which means gold) standing near thevegetable stall. Dahabi was a tourist camel, which means she took tourists for rides to see the sights in the desert, like the pyramids. She had a camel saddle (which is calleda howea in Arabic) on her hump. It was draped with brightly colored rugs and pillows in red and blue, yellow and green. She had little red and blue, yellow and green pom pom tassles on her bridle. The human who owned her had shaved beautiful patterns into her golden coat.
Kolobe the Warthog - Will you be my Mama?
This is a very sad story with a very happy ending about a little warthog called Kolobe who lived in Botswana. Here is a picture of him when he was just new in the bushveld. His Mama guarded him fiercely and loved him deeply and thought he was the most beautiful baby warthog in the whole world. She called him Kolobe, which means Warthog in Tswana, because that is what he was.
Camp Xakanaxa – October 2023 - Presence
“What you really see, you will remember forever.” ~ Guide and Ranger Taylor
Camp Xakanaxa (pronounced Ka-ka-na-ka) is on the banks of the Khwai River on the Xakanaxa Lagoon in Moremi Game Park, Botswana.
Taylor was our Bushman guide – a direct lineage Bushman. His grandfather still hunted with a bow and arrow and wore a loin cloth, living the life of a hunter gatherer, at one with the land on which he was born. Taylor, just one generation removed from this state of consciousness and way of life, was clearly the superior tracker and most bush-wise of all the trackers, calling in on the radio to the others with his latest observations. He led the chase, so to speak, finding the lion, wild dogs, ostrich, marsh eagle – all sightings that one might ordinarily see or not see, but that he ensured he found for us and all the other vehicles.
“The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two "hungers". There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning...There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning. There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you're happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong.” ~Sir Laurens van der Post: The Lost World of the Kalahari
Read this website: https://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/bushmen - for those of you that experienced Taylor and his wisdom, I hope you also felt his deep pain. His language is not even recognized in Botswana anymore. It is not taught in schools and the way of the Bushmen is dying rapidly. What you experienced in this man was a rare glimpse into a way of life that is gone, a state of consciousness that no longer exists except in very rare instances and a wisdom that is not heard or acknowledged. He spoke of this without bitterness or anger, but with acceptance and sadness. It was my great privilege to have shared a little time and space in his beautiful eternal Presence.
Camp Xakanaxa - October 2023 - Interdependence
All of life is interdependent and when this balance is broken, everything suffers. It seems like a simple and obvious statement and yet, we fail to see either the cause or the effect of our decisions that disrupt the delicate and highly complex interdependence of all species. Our Bushman guide and ranger, Taylor, gave us a small lesson that was heart brea king.
Moremi in October is dry, and normally game a little scarcer and more scattered as it congregates near water sources, but this year seemed unbearably barren at the end of the winter months. The mopani bushveld seemed very low and barren and was not yet sprouting its beautiful red leaves of spring. It seemed particularly eaten down to about 4 feet everywhere I looked. In this part of Botswana, the Mopane tree can reach 70 to 90 feet and is a magnificent hard wood tree, creating lovely woodland terrain. I asked Taylor, our ranger about it.
Out of Africa - Hidden Treasure
Beneath the coarse surface of material being I managed to touch the purple hue, and I came to know the radiance of divinity. ~Solovyov
My father grew up in the desert town of Kimberly.... his ancestors were fortune hunters and adventurers who went rushing there from Europe when diamonds were discovered in 1866. The first diamond of 21.25 carats was discovered by a teenage boy on his father’s farm on the banks of the Orange River. The area is inhospitable, thorn scrub and when the wind blows the desert sand forms dust devils and the tumbleweed dances across the bleak flatlands. In 1866 there were only a few brave, subsistence farmers, struggling against the elements with their hardy sheep, goats and donkeys. And yet deep under the earth in round cores of hard rock called Kimberlite are found some of the worlds most beautiful diamonds. Kimberlite was formed from underground volcanoes of molten rock (magma). Diamonds are formed deep down in dark black Mother earth through immense pressure and incredible heat.
The surface of the planet does not reveal her secrets easily. And we are no different.
The outer presentation of our lives tells us nothing of the suffering, the heat, the pressure, the long process of formation and cooling and the eons of our finest qualities lying unfound in the darkness.
The process of extracting diamonds is a long and tedious one. They must be discovered, then the rock is mined ~ a treacherous and dangerous process. The rock is crushed, and the diamonds extracted. Then they must be cut, and polished. The final product is a gem of great beauty with many facets that glow and sparkle with light, reflecting little rainbows in the sun.... a worthy symbol of love, joy, peace, kindness, generosity, faithfulness to what is true, self control and gentleness – the words so often used in wedding ceremonies – and meant not just for the other person but for yourself too. The rock and impurities become sand and return to the desert. It is no longer distinguishable from the rest of the earth. The diamond however is indestructible.
Our diamond nature too is indestructible but hidden at the core of our earthly selves. It is not always visible on the surface of our lives, even to ourselves. We are often not aware of the heat and pressure that caused the diamond of our true Self to be embedded in rock. The process of extraction is long, tedious and hard. It requires discipline, faith and desire. We can avoid the work in many ways and stay on the surface by making excuse for ourselves and others or jumping to conclusions about what the external surface manifestations mean. Remember tumbleweed and dry desert dust storms may conceal hidden diamonds.
Don’t make excuses
or
jump to conclusions
about your behavior
or
that of others.
Stay open.
Stay attentive.
Ask.
Dig deeper.
You know very little until you have found the hidden treasure of yourself.
© Lyndall Johnson August 2006
Out of Africa - The Rain Spider - Kindness, not Cruelty
“Sometimes it's easy to lose faith in people. And sometimes one act of kindness is all it takes to give you hope again.” ~ Randa Abdel-Fattah
Some of you already know the story of Jenny and I in Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens earlier this year. She inadvertently trod on a giant rain spider on the path. It lay there, mortally wounded, writhing, and squirming in agony.
It is easy to squish a little bug, but the bigger something gets the harder it gets. Jenny stood there crying, begging me to squash it. My own natural horror at watching something suffering kicked in and I very unkindly said, “You trod on it, you kill it!” She bravely stomped down on it and ground it into the pavement. But the day became a little drabber and sadder as we walked on. Something that evokes intense feelings always has a lesson imbedded in it and this one was complex to sort out. Clearly Jen did the kindest thing in killing the spider and letting it die a quicker death than it would have had we just walked on. I knew without a doubt that this was the kindest thing to do. And I also knew how unkind I had been in the way I told her to do it herself.
But would I have been caretaking Jen and her own responsibility had I killed the spider for her? On reflection, I was caretaking by not doing it. I was unkind. Caretaking is always unkind. The unspoken message in what I said was, “Stop being such a baby and be responsible.” This was just the same message I got as a child that helped me repress my natural aversion to killing. I didn’t want to kill the spider, as childhood feelings of having to kill fish and chickens arose in me. I was protecting myself from my feelings. I suppose I could rationalize that Jen needed to learn to do the “kind” thing and go against her natural resistance. This, however, is the rationalization my father used. If you eat something you must know how to kill it, quickly and mercifully. But that is just rationalization because I know that had I not been there, Jenny would have killed it anyway. The incident stayed with me until I got clarity. The little rain spider’s life was a great sacrifice that day to my working through old traumas and getting clear as to how I was willing to pass on the same trauma to my sister as my father did to me.
This is a little twist on the usual narrative of caretaking, which is generally seen as doing things for others that they should and could do for themselves. I could certainly have rationalized that, in the interests of my own growth in setting limits with others, I should not have done for Jenny what she could do for herself. The truth is that would have been a lovely lie to tell myself. It is not the action that determines whether something is caretaking or not – it is the motive. My motive was fear, old pain, and unprocessed trauma. I was caretaking my own feelings and resistance to doing some inner work.
It is always humbling to recognize something like this in ourselves. Humbling, but not shaming. Luckily, I could clearly feel compassion for myself as a child and recognize how this event with Jenny could have occurred some 50 years later rooted in the repressed feelings of sadness and horror I had as a child. I wish I had worked through this so that I could have been kind and killed the spider for my sister. I can be kind to myself that I didn’t have the awareness at the time.
Other situations are harder – we tend to shame ourselves instead of seeing ourselves with kindness.
When we do this, we create secondary trauma to ourselves.
This brings us to an even bigger issue. There is a time for killing, and motive is everything. I am glad neither of us enjoy killing, do not seek it out as a sport, and see it as only something to do under the direst of circumstances to stop needless suffering- and perhaps as a means to a larger good. And this was the gift of my father teaching me to kill quickly and mercifully. There was no room for hesitation and indecisiveness – this would cause a slow death and suffering to the creature being killed.
People who enjoy the “sport” of killing (and have rationalized this in a thousand ways), come to Africa from all over the world for the momentary rush of power in needless killing. We have heard every rationalization under the sun to make killing something glorious. There is not one argument that holds any credence. If you enjoy killing and seek it out, or condone it, you are unaware. Killing, hunting, and war have long been an industry. What is killed is a “trophy,” not a living expression of God. Just a commodity, a target, an enemy, objectified to destroy it. And in destroying from this motive, we ourselves are destroyed. Our own humanity lost in a self-created hell.
Lest we become self-righteous and judgmental, these are the people that need the greatest kindness and love to reawaken their hearts. Those hearts have tragically become mechanical time- pieces ticking away the hours of their precious lives. Once we have learned to enjoy killing, we have learned to stomp on our own hearts and feelings. We have repressed, rationalized, and found a way to feed off the energy and rush of death itself. We have become vampires. For those of you that have not yet watched the movie “Fury,” go and see it. It portrays so graphically and well how we can all learn to enjoy killing, depending on how brutalized we are. It is very good expression of the horrors and extremes of unaware, 2nd quadrant behavior.
I am forever grateful to those that have shown me kindness in my own hard heartedness. It awakened my heart to be a throbbing, beating, bleeding real heart that feels sorrow and heartache, shame and fear. And love. And compassion. Without knowing pain, we can never know the joy of compassion, and we are not yet real human beings.
So, sometimes killing is kind and sometimes to not kill is cruelty. But each one of us must reflect on our own motives, attitudes, beliefs, needs, and feelings. Without awareness we will not even know what being kind means.
© Lyndall Johnson 2014
The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christians attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
~Jung
Exercises
· Consider carefully how you “kill unkindly” with thoughts and attitudes, out of fear and shame, in words and deeds, yourself, others, creatures of the world?
What cruelty within you needs to be replaced with kindness?
· Write a manifesto/pledge for kindness and non-violence, in thoughts, words, and deeds.
The Silk Worm - Importance of Defense
Every child in Africa, at some time or another, raises silkworms. You get a little bit of cardboard from a shoebox in which a moth has laid eggs, from a friend and wait for them to hatch. Then you feed them mulberry leaves, that result in them one day spinning light gold cocoons, or beet leaves, which results in them one day spinning pink cocoons. For me the reward of the silk that they spun was what kept me motivated to take very good care of them, cleaning their poop out of the shoe box, and bringing them lovely fresh leaves every day, which they munched through voraciously, growing very quickly from tiny little black specks, into to fat, juicy caterpillars that had zebra markings.
