Page 70 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

Perhaps we hadn’t gone to Africa for answers; perhaps we had gone to refine the

questions we’ve been carrying for years, that have deepened and expanded with

each encounter. Who has agency, the human or the elephant? The

Ambassador, an individual, particularly gifted elephant? The herd? The

elephant people? A unique aggregation of individual souls? The embodied

Elephant culture? Increasingly, it seems that elephants by their unique

immersion in a continuously responsive herd are exercising agency in

relationship to us. Maybe they developed this capacity in response to the terrible

circumstances of their lives as they face loss of habitat, interrupted migration

corridors, poaching. all equaling extinction at our hands.

We are left with the original unfathomable events. How do the Ambassador and

his people know we are coming to Chobe? It may be that elephants, who are

probably more intelligent than we are through their capacity for unparalleled

empathy, can read the heart across vast distances, unimpeded by species

barriers, and send out subliminal communications which I / we receive and

respond to by coming to meet them.

I was reading The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony when flying home

from my 2011 visit to Chobe. Anthony, the founder of the South African reserve

Thula Thula, had had a remarkable relationship with elephants based on intimacy

and proximity. One might even say the elephants engineered their transfer to his

reserve in order to create this relationship. I wanted very much to meet him but

he died suddenly before I returned to Africa. Then stories emerged of the

elephants knowing of his death and coming to his house every year on the

anniversary of his death. How is this possible? What does it mean? What do

the elephants want us to know?

Cyndie and I will be returning to the elephants in the last days of December

2016. We will spend New Years Eve and another few days at Thula Thula.

Perhaps Anthony’s herd will visit us.

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