About this episode
Journal entry.
The best time to be in the leadwood forest is in the creamy light of a full moon.
All around the trees peg a scale of time beyond human comprehension to the earth.
It can be a strange thing to watch people from all over the world walk into the dappled light of the trees and fall silent.
In my days as a safari guide I would wait for the third or fourth day of a safari. I would wait for the hysteria to see animals to subside and then take people to the forest.
You see the forest can be experienced on many levels and I have come to believe that it will meet you where you are ….it will take you to the level of stillness, wildness or reverence that you have cultivated in yourself and then some. The deeper you are the deeper the magic of the forest.
The poet david whyte talks about the conversational nature of life. The idea that your life will never be exactly how you planned it to be but equally it will never be exactly the way life wanted it. for all our living days we are in a co-created experience with living…..some of our agency….mixed with life or god, or whatever you call its plan.
Inside of this we have action when we know to take it and surrender when we have reached the end of what we can do…. another dance.
We have the development of a contemplative mind ……the cultivation of a mind in which many things in the world can be true at the same time.
Being in nature takes you naturally into this kind of inner exploration. If your eyes are open in a place life the leadwood forrest you can't help but notice the relational nature of nature,
As dawn breaks in the forest a dark bull nyala lifts his head out of long brown winter grass to look at me.
Franklins begin to chatter into the dawn.
In the stereo all around me hyena started to call.
A hyena is the perfect embodiment of opportunism.
As he moves craftily through the bush he seems to have a single thought running through his head…… “what's in it for me?” ‘how could this situation beeeeee good for me”
If you have ever battled to put your own needs on the table……hyena is your guy. He's gonna show you how.
Im developing a strange technique for this podcast. What I do is go to a place like the leadwood forest.
I move through the terrain at different times of day. I take a big sniff of the Amazonian snuff called hapi which is a mix of tobacco and ashes of herbs. Then with my head empty of thoughts I open myself and move through the space.
Opening myself to a different way of knowing. It's like I'm trawling through the feeling of the place and each feeling is full of invisible codes that later when I sit down with my notebook will start to come out as memories, encounters, stories and insights.
You see like those hyena calls in the forest this morning took me to an image of the hyena. In my mind's eye I saw his slanted body loping away with the leg of a giraffe held across his jaws a
