Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  “I want you to think about what you want to leave behind,” Darryl told me.

  “Leave behind?”

  “You can give the things inside you back to the earth if you want.”

  “Um … okay.”

  “Everything is good, brother. How it is, is okay.”

  As we heated the rocks that would warm the sweat lodge, fear began building inside me. When Martha had first told me about the sweat lodge, I’d felt my heart float upward in my chest with hope. Now I was reconsidering. I’d heard reports on how intense the heat could be. I was afraid of being locked into a hot, dark hole. I didn’t know what would come up inside a burning oven designed to rip me open. I’d spent almost every day of the last seven years battening down emotional hatches.

  I breathed out as far as I could, trying to still the fear. The ancient cultures knew the value of falling apart. They did it regularly, on purpose. The Aboriginal Australians had ceremonies for men and walkabouts in the penetrating heat of the desert. Native Americans had the sweat lodge. I knew that my falseness and fear needed melting. I knew that I couldn’t keep up my defenses and tolerate the physical extremes of the ceremony at the same time. This was a startling thought, but not a pleasant one. I wished I were more like Dad or Uncle John; this shit wouldn’t scare them.

  We offered blessings, then drank the bitter, oily, earthy peyote brew. I was afraid that I’d trip out in some psychedelic way. “What’s it going to do to me, Darryl?” I asked, trying to look relaxed.

  “The medicine only gives what you need,” he told me gently. “There is nothing to fear.”

  The sweat lodge was a shallow dugout covered with heavy blankets. We had to crouch down and crawl inside on our hands and knees. It was pitch-black inside, a safe cradle of the earth just the right size for me and my demons. Packed closely together, ten of us awaited the arrival of the first rocks, the “grandfathers.” There was no place to go; just my own body and the heat.

  The elders described how the blanket-draped sticks over the earth’s womb were the ribs of the Great Mother. “In our way, we honor the Mother,” the leader said. “In the sweat we go back to her and we let her hold us again. When you emerge from the hollowed ground, you are reborn.” Everyone was invited to give thanks; like all Navajo ceremonies, the ritual of the sweat lodge is first and foremost an act of gratitude.

  “I want to give thanks for this fire and this gathering, for this earth, for my wife, Pam, and her beautiful way,” said Darryl softly. In the darkness, his words created an image of light.

  In the sweat lodge, we all sat on the same ground. We all expressed our gratitude to the wood for birthing the fire; everything was honored. I listened to the medicine men speaking their thanks to the consciousness of everything, every object, space itself. We are the earth’s thinking children, and our thoughts can bless or curse. These people, I realized with awe, know what it means to be keepers of the garden.

  The rocks arrived into the blackness, glowing red from their time in the fire. They hissed and spat as water was ladled onto them. The temperature climbed. The elders broke the sweat ceremony into four sessions; between each one, they lifted up the Great Mother’s skirts—the blankets that sealed the lodge’s sides—to give us a brief respite of cooler air. The sessions had no set time; the lead elder moved as guided by the ancestors.

  The experience was, in a word, intolerable. I kept squirming around, sometimes sitting, sometimes kneeling and putting my face into the earth, trying desperately to find a cooler place. Soon I couldn’t remember how many sessions there had been, only that the one taking place right now felt as if it would never end. The elders sang and chanted, somehow finding oxygen in the fire-starved air. Every time water hit the rocks, a fresh wave of heat filled the space. It just kept getting impossibly hotter. A desperate war raged inside me—I wanted to run for the door; I wanted to fight the heat with all the willpower I had, push it back, feel better. I wanted to flee this hell. I sought the most resilient bush guy parts of me; I ran to every hatch I’d ever battened—it was the response that had gotten me through every trial so far. “I’m strong,” I thought. “I don’t want to relent.” But I was burning up, losing my resolve against the relentless heat.

  As the ceremony went on, interminably on and on, I felt my last defense disintegrate in the heat. Every idea that told me who I was caught fire, burned away. I realized that “being strong” wasn’t an idea worth keeping. No idea of self, no fleeting creation of human pride, was worth keeping.

  As the heat built, so did a crescendo of singing, sobbing, and screaming. The demons were finding their voices through the people sitting around me; the heat absorbed the sharp notes in their cries. When the elders lifted the lodge’s skirts to let in some air and light, it was odd to see the regular people sitting around this circle, knowing they had made those primeval sounds.

  I felt as if I’d lost a gallon of fluid; everything was pouring out of me. The heat had to win. It had burned its way through my self-concept; now it was heating the barriers to memory, turning steel into liquid, and I wasn’t strong enough to resist it. In my mind, fueled by the peyote, a slow slide show of horror began to click forward. I saw the look on my father’s face as the litigation dealt him another blow. I saw my darling mother trying to shore up her family against the effects of all we had been through. I saw my uncle losing part of himself with every yard of earth that was robbed of its original nature, hurt so deeply by the evil of men. I saw how we had always tried our best, and how our strength held us apart from each other.

  Then suddenly, I was far away from the sounds in the sweat lodge. It was absolutely quiet. I saw myself sitting alone in an African clearing. It was late afternoon, and the sky was pale pink, peaceful. A leopard was walking toward me with white butterflies floating around her paws, silent in the fading light. It made me so happy to see her sleek, gentle beauty. She walked right up to me and rubbed her head against my shoulder. Then she lay down next to me in the summer grass.

  I was pulled from my body, floating up above Londolozi. The leopard watched my spirit rise. I saw zebras, wildebeests, and a herd of impalas. I floated toward the river, where hippos blew great funnels of mist into the air as I glided past. I saw the granite dome where my grandfather’s ashes had been scattered. I felt like a piece of heaven was pasted down here, that the great ebony trees were in fact pegs connecting this canvas of God to the ground. The bateleur eagle was gliding next to me, my constant guide. I was at such peace.

  Then the vision was gone and I was back in the sweat lodge, lying on the ground, my face in the dirt.

  I submitted to the heat. I submitted to everything. I submitted to my own weakness. All the hatches gave way, melted, vaporized. The slide show began again, now rapid-fire: the mamba climbing up my leg, my father’s mouth bleeding as he bit the inside of his cheek in fear, my shredded calf after the crocodile attack, the blood on Uncle John’s Masai bracelet after the helicopter crash, the pistol thrust into my mouth, the man boiling to death, Tatty going into the ground, Gogo’s small cancer-ridden frame, my father battered to prostration on the couch by litigation, the fights about curtains, the endless nightmares and morning fear. Sweat. My body began retching.

  Then it was all quiet. Everything I was had burned up, leaving empty space. And I realized that this clear openness, space itself, was the only real strength, the only thing that could not be destroyed.

  I awoke on my belly outside the lodge, on a large pile of sticks and leaves. A Navajo brother with long plaits was trickling water over me. My body was covered with dirt and twigs. I could feel the hum of the earth, the great vibration; I could smell the faint smoke of the cedar wood. I felt merged with the earth. I was still retching.

  The brother was singing Navajo incantations over me. “Lie still, brother,” he told me. “You have been to the other place to fetch the medicine.”

  Come with me, that other leopard had commanded as he walked past me, cloaked in that other fire. I will ta
ke you to another place. He had honored his promise.

  “I feel like I might die,” I whispered.

  “No, brother, that’s what being born feels like. You will see.”

  To restore ourselves, we must surrender everything that is not ourselves.

  I took my tender, new self to visit my friend Ashley and her husband, Rob, at their home on a lake in Connecticut.

  I did lots of solitary kayaking, watching the parade of my thoughts, noticing the calm that had largely replaced the turbulent waves. Some days, though, I still woke from anxious dreams, sweating.

  It seemed nothing less than miraculous that though I had once felt that there were parts of myself that couldn’t be trusted and feelings that might never return, I found myself coming back to my true nature. It had been there all along, but I had grown so disconnected from it under the stress of everything that had happened. There I was, in a scene from a movie: sitting on a bleached gray dock on a sunny summer day, the green sea before me—an endless cliché. Ash’s son, Gates, and his cousin Megan stepped onto the dock behind me. Gates was a skinny boy of ten with big brown eyes, curly brown hair, and an animated face that looked like it held a hundred goofy schemes. Megan, a year or so older, was deeply tanned, with freckles across her nose and coquettish green eyes.

  The children pranced down to the end of the dock like the stars of a Hollywood movie, their exuberance uncontainable. Their faces shining with sunscreen, they grabbed hands and sprinted along the dock’s boarded length. Behind them the sparkling sea flashed like the cameras crowding a red carpet, if the red carpet had a crab pot tied to its end. They were the actors and this was the movie of their life, one only I could see because I was sitting in the theater, watching the sheer joy of jumping into a cool sea with your best friend on a warm summer day.

  That night Ash called me from the living room with a finger over her lips in the universal sign for “Be quiet.” We crept down the hallway and lingered outside the bedroom where Gates and Megan were singing songs to each other. As I listened to those soft, confident voices, all my raggedness vanished. Yes, right there in the hallway, I felt again. And I knew I was back from the wasteland.

  For a long time, I didn’t think I could recover a sense of faith in life. I’d felt so washed out; all the colors were faded versions of what they had been, a picture left too long on a bulletin board that catches the afternoon sun in a forgotten part of the kitchen. Now the color was back.

  Being jaded, feeling you’ve been down the wrong end of the barrel too many times, seeing your fortresses crumble, is something we all go through. I accept that. Innocence is really just presence at its simplest. It’s what Gates and Megan had shown me: play and laughter for their own sakes. I hadn’t known if I could recapture that part of myself, until the tracks had led me there.

  The next morning, I woke up missing home with an intensity that surprised and delighted me. I missed the francolins’ morning call, the scent of the sweetgrass at sunrise, the bushbucks and nyalas grazing outside my window. I wanted to eat ice cream, I wanted to walk for hours in the bush, I wanted to lie on my back and stare at the sky all night with people I loved. I wanted to live.

  More than anything, I wanted to go home to Londolozi.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE LEOPARDS BY THE WATERING HOLE

  SUMMER HAD ARRIVED. In the glades and gardens around the camps, butterflies cut the air in flashes of orange, white, and yellow. The rejuvenation of nature was spread over the landscape in thick concentrations of life. Dried earth became swaths of grassland.

  Every morning I woke up having come home a little bit more to myself. I’d been away for ten months. I tried to coax the cells of my body to lose the frantic buzz from all my travels, to reconnect with the gentle, lilting hum of nature. While all the guests went out on their afternoon safari drive, I took myself out, powered by my own legs, into the bushveld. I sat around the puddles, my feet soaking in the sunlit warm water. Frogs patrolled the shores, while all around me dragonflies swarmed like a squadron of nimble jet fighters around a lumbering airship. I was as fascinated by the dragonflies as I was by a lion. The rain-rinsed air highlighted the complex striations of lichen and bark on the knobthorn trees.

  The physical journey I’d taken thousands of miles away from home had allowed me to finally see the entirety of where I’d come from. Now I felt so elementally linked to my physical home that becoming aware again of the beauty of the wilderness was like seeing the truth about what was still inside me. I thought of how the bushveld goes dry and dormant in the winter while life thrums below the surface, waiting to be liberated by rain. I thought of a woman who’d once ridden on my safari truck; she’d looked at me as a herd of elephants surrounded us and said, “I never knew how much I loved them until right now!” We are all filled with an ocean of latent love for parts of life that lie yet undiscovered. Within this regeneration was the seed of everything that had become important to me: the art of death and rebirth, restoration from the inside out.

  Mom, Dad, and Bron didn’t rush me to do anything. In realizing how truly barren I had been, they’d also realized that it was true for them, too. While I had gone looking for healing, it had been happening naturally at home for everyone else in my family.

  Dad had been spending time every afternoon under the big ebony tree in the garden, trying to meditate. “It’s bloody difficult,” he told me. Stillness was not a natural state for this man, who’d spent his life making reserves, building lodges, working in the physical realm, but he was committed to trying.

  I told Mom about all the things I had seen in my vision.

  “I’ve been on that same path, Boydie,” she told me. “I’ve set out to heal myself, too. I’ve started a little vegetable garden. Every day I turn the soil, and that’s my meditation.”

  The real balm of life resides in such simple things. I saw how one journey to healing can open doors to others’ healing.

  My parents left me to heal the final parts of myself in nature. Mom would see me and say nothing more than “I’m here if you need me.”

  My walk one day took me farther into the woods around the house. I walked barefoot so I could feel the moistness and warmth of the earth. In the thick riverine of the drainage line, the grass had been flattened by hippos making their way to the nearby dam. I could see their four-toed tracks slipping in the wet mud as they waddled back to their daytime resting pools. Around me, peering silently from the grassy banks, was a herd of nyalas. Their ears pressed forward in curiosity; the softness of the skin around their mouths made me notice the simple gentleness of their carriage and manner. I felt like Adam in the garden, alone in the warm silence with the animals.

  I walked out of the grove, into a clearing with a watering hole. On the hole’s far side, in the shade of a short acacia tree, I saw two young leopards, about ten months old. They saw me at exactly the same time. The leopards, doubtless waiting while their mother hunted, were already sizable. Normally, they would be shy of a human on foot; I expected them to sprint for safety into a thicker patch of bush. At the very least, I thought, they’d keep me firmly fixed in their gaze, their bodies coiled and twitching in case they needed to move quickly.

  Instead, one lay down and dozed, while the other turned his attention to a yellow-billed hornbill hopping awkwardly from branch to spiny branch in the acacia above him.

  Over the course of the next hour, I edged closer to the cubs, close enough to see that one had a pink nose, his brother a black one. Black Nose snapped at flies buzzing around his face, while Pinky fell into a deep sleep. To my amazement, I wound up sitting three yards away from them, on the other side of the pan. The day was perfectly quiet except for a cackling flock of wood hoopoes floating past. A starling landed and hopped around me quizzically, as if puzzled by this strange scene of a half-naked man and two wild leopards relaxing by a pond together.

  Eventually I stood and backed slowly away. When I was behind some brush, out of the leopards’ sight, I
began jogging. Then something inside me started to build, an astounding wave of energy that flooded through my legs, pushing me into a sprint. The pent-up joy burst out of me.

  I ran for miles, sweat mixing with tears of elation I couldn’t hold back: the great-grandson of a leopard hunter who has leopards for friends, passing through a land that was once farmed into bankruptcy, then healed to a thriving wilderness. A bateleur eagle flew overhead. I could feel my grandfather and great-grandfather running beside me. I think they understood why we don’t hunt or cull or kill the animals anymore. They understood that a great change was occurring. They were with me to help my generation restore the earth for my children and my children’s children.

  I felt I could run forever. I passed herds of impalas and zebras, feeling their springy energy, the towering gentleness of giraffes, the wisdom radiating from a herd of elephants. These were my family, my kin. I’m not ignorant or innocent; I know full well that this is a dangerous and damaged world. But I’d found safety again in nature and in my own heart in the cathedral of the wild.

  Suddenly I felt reengaged with a vision that had animated generations in my family, a vision as clear as the one I had seen in the sweat lodge. Simply this: I, too, wanted to reconnect people to our kin in nature.

  I remembered the male leopard who’d appeared in a veil of orange smoke, the shaman who connects humans to nature, who had come to teach me that I could walk through fire. I remembered his mate, the female who had come to me in the earth’s womb and opened me to gentleness, play, and nourishment. Those magical masculine and feminine powers, both sent as emissaries from nature, were healers. I knew they could heal others. We should all walk with butterflies floating by our feet, and we can. In that moment, I knew that my work was in Africa with my family, with nature and with the animals.