17. Understanding death: the Matobo experience

Death is often regarded as a singular once-off event. The end of life. Like birth, it is one of the most important “events” in the journey of life itself. It marks the other end of birth. The final stage. As it is at the opposite side of birth it also creates very much the opposite emotions to birth - both for the individual who experiences it and the people who are “left behind”. (That euphemism actually says a lot more beneath the surface. In essence it means that death is after all not the final stage but that death actually allows the individual into the next phase…to leave others behind, the deceased is moving on, elsewhere!)

Most, if not all religions in the world, suggest in some or other way that there is life beyond the dark curtain of initial death. We either “go to heaven” or come back as another human or component of life, perhaps wiser and better equipped than before, ever improving as individuals. (An interesting thought to evolutionists… how do the reincarnates contribute to increasing vigor or value of the species?)

Being with Matobo, and seeing its processes and transitions and the flow of life in many different forms and mutations, death becomes more of a continuous process rather than a single event, often challenging my understanding or perception of death, which was primarily formed as part of my Christian upbringing. Death as the end of life becomes a little more muddled when one looks at nature and how death is manifested in other beings. 

While I may have seen many dead trees, the actual death of a tree may take many years to complete, a slow process that reduces the elaborate branches to mere wood, which remains a wooden skeleton for decades, as if it created its own tombstone, the final tribute to many years and cycles of life and death itself. 

In the case of deciduous trees, large parts of the tree die off each year, the bark and leaves peel off and fall to the ground and they are incorporated in the soil beneath the tree, turned into nutrient-harboring compost which the plant may absorb in an absurd form of auto-cannibalism (which is a completely different subject - lets contain our focus to death!).  Trees, or at least, parts of trees die off every year, something higher organisms such as humans and other mammals do not experience. The skin is said to be the largest organ of the human, and therefore snakes and other reptiles who lose their skins each year, shedding it to sport an entirely new fresh skin, therefore also suffer some limited form of an annual death cycle!

Like the tree, that grows new leaves all the time, or in annual bursts every spring, colonies of termites and bees, may grow new individuals who can not survive on their own, and therefore form part of what is often referred to as a single organism, the colony. The “castes” represent different organs - the breeders are likened to the reproductive organs, and those growing mushrooms from lignin and other plant material are said to be the gastrointestinal system of the larger being etc. Here the death of an individual is nothing more than shedding an epithelial cell or two in the digestive tract of the larger organism. So, how do we define death in this case where the death of an individual is simply an unimportant process of recycling as fresh beings contribute to the larger whole?

While an individual tree may experience many years of cyclic deaths or deaths of smaller parts of itself, some vegetatively reproducing plants, like certain grasses, may actually never really die! The clones or new shoots grow from parent material and although seen as “new youngsters” they are actually the parent plant itself, at least genetically. While other parts of the plant, other clones may die off, the actual individual may end up as many individuals and while some of these may die, the actual plant survives many deaths! The original remains intact and alive in many places all at once! Bizarre.

My beloved lichens may undergo a similar process, though it is even more complex, considering the fact that they are made up of two species merged into one morphological being that grows clonally for many thousands of years, separating from itself and creating “new” colonies (yeah, not even individuals, cause the individual is made of at least two species!!!). So for them, and we may not be able to fathom it, death as we know and understand it - may actually never come! Great, is it not?!

What would be catastrophic is the death of an entire species, extinction, the ultimate death. That would constitute the passing of what could be a critical component of the complex system. As long as the deaths are countered by births and clones and seeds emerge to replace adults with young then its all ok. But too many deaths of critical components may lead to the death or collapse of the entire system as we know it. Meta death, if there is such a thing!

Incredible as nature is, this has happened many times before, and may happen again. We can only hope that a new order may emerge from what is left and evolve to initiate another revolution of evolution around the axis of life itself.

15. Matobo Time

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - 

an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe.

Matobo Time

We sat high above Matopos on the warm granite with the cool breeze in our faces when Emile asked me how long I am going to be. “A lifetime...,” I answered. 

I watched him for a little while as the wind played in his hair. “The lifetime of the bacteria decaying this dung beetle or the lifetime of the big guy down there?” he asks as he sits up and points with a piece of grass to a white rhino down below in the valley. In my mind’s eye I suddenly see this place in a different dimension. I see Matobo made up, constructed of time, the make-up of life itself. At the smaller lever I “see” mitochondria buzzing around in cells and cells dividing and things growing and happening relatively fast at a microscopic level, as I did as a young zoologist. At the other end of the scale, under my hand I rubbed the fine dust off the granite rock, also at a microscopic level but at a temporal scale even my relatively intelligent mind struggles to fathom.  I wonder how long that took. As I gazed over the landscape surrounding me, instinctively the scientist in me started to divide the world around me into discrete groups of individuals, events and processes based on the relevant timescale during which it happens or lives. 

When you consider the whole, the entire ecosystem, the time scale is millennia or eons, the longer yardsticks of time. However, when you break the system down into an array of increasingly smaller sub-systems, smaller and more precise units of time are required. You could measure the lifecycle of a rhino in years, while months are more appropriate to measure the gestation period of his equally obnoxious wife, but the passage rate of the grass through his digestive system is more appropriately measured in days. Fertilization of his calf took place within a few seconds while oxygen exchange in his enormous lungs is probably measured in smaller fractions of time. Many measures of time are appropriate to discuss the lifecycle of our rhino, but for others the entire process is over in a few seconds or even less. 

The shortest of events and lifetimes

A gust of wind may sweep across a field of grass and a million grasses are pollinated, just like that. End of story. A significant event that took a few fleeting seconds, but its impact will be prominent when a million grass seeds germinate in a few months time after the rains. Some critical events take place over a very short period of time. Raindrops fall, and the soil is instantly wet, just as the water was a fluid one moment and the next it's a gas.  Some smaller species complete an entire lifecycle in a few days. Some mysterious flowers only open to be pollinated at night, and then only for a few nights, and then its all over. Many of the smaller critters and plants typically only live for one season, then their duties as denizens of their world is complete. For them seconds and hours and days are far more relevant. Months are towards the outer extreme of time measurement for them.

Some lower organisms, live for only a very short periods of time, those single cell organisms and smaller invertebrates in ephemeral ponds transcend dry seasons as spores.  Similarly, some lower plants, some fungi live for very short periods of time, and are highly opportunistic in their approach to life. These shorter life cycles are controlled and affected by the duration of shorter environmental cycles, like day and night, the seasons with wet and dry cycles, cold and warm periods, and even the ratios between light and day. 

The annuals

Some plants and animals live according to very strict annual cycles. One year is the limit for them. Their life-cycles are punctuated by the seasons, normally starting with the rains and ending with the winter. Then there is a period of rest, the dormant stage. Annual plants transcend this period as seeds. The plant itself is no longer there, but many seeds remain behind to initiate new cycles of life. The animal equivalent to annuals are the many insect species who live for only short periods of time and survive the harsh period as eggs. Butterflies are the most typical of these. The eggs hatch in spring and the caterpillars eat their way to adulthood, go through their incredible metamorphosis and emerge as butterflies, painting the landscape in small sections from flower to flower.

For most of these smaller creatures, the annual cycle is all they will live through and experience. No memories of last year, or the year of great floods or the drought of 1982. They just have now, as there is no real past, apart from yesterday and last week and if they are really lucky last month. There also is no real future, no next year or ‘one day’. Perhaps they don't miss it because they don't have it. Perhaps now is enough.

Those who live a little longer

Others have a past and a future. I watch the young impala play, learning about their futures.Their lives are measured in years rather than months. Other processes within them are measured in shorter yardsticks. Their gestation period is 7 months. They are affected by the annual cycles, breed highly seasonally so all the lambs are born in a very short time. Like the life cycles of the short lived species of Matobo, their lives are hugely controlled by the seasons, breeding cycles, times of abundance and shortages,  but the adults cross over into the next season and the next. For them, there must be more of a sense of the past and the future. Hence, the learning as youngsters, butting heads and chasing each other in mock predator prey plays. 

The barrier from the one season to the next, in Matobo, is winter, the dry season. I often think, in terms of evolutionary jumps/progress, crossing that invisible barrier must have been a great challenge and achievement. There are many ways in which to cross that bridge between being one and being two years old! Some plants do it by going dormant in the harsh part of the year. Some trees loose their leaves and sit out the winter. They just hang in there, expending as little energy and resources as possible. Others, like many reptiles will eat as much as they can before the winter and then find a cosy place to hibernate, allowing their body temperatures to drop. They use as little energy as possible to stay alive and then emerge pretty lean when spring arrives. Others are simply big enough, mobile enough and store enough reserves to carry them through winter. These are often the warm blooded part of the family, those who can collect and burn energy to stay with us on the surface during winter. These guys can often live for many many years. Think rhino and elephant. The cold blooded strategy also works well for crocodiles and pythons and tortoises. They live long because they use their energy sparingly and add up the years that way. For them the lifespan yardstick is very long... decades.

Leaving individual lives behind...

There are other timescales that are also relevant. Those which goes beyond the scale of individual lives. When we think about how the whole of the system evolves and develops, it essentially operates at a time scale way beyond the relevant measures of the oldest of individuals. The growth of, and the interactions between individuals within populations, allows for individual species to evolve into functional groups of communities, whether they are antelope communities, grasslands, forests or wetlands. At this level, shorter processes and limited lifespans merge into one another and all fuse to produce larger infinite timescales. The shorter timescales are still important, but they have merged into one another and like the different pieces of a mosaic they loose their individual relevance when looked at from a distance. Similarly, at least in my mind the cyclic nature of the smaller time intervals merge into processes of extended duration, creating the larger infinite temporal landscape. 

This is the scale at which the larger environmental processes are important. Cycles of dry and wet periods follow on each other, the result being the specific dynamics of forests and grasslands competing for area, predators and prey oscillate in numbers as some species increase and others crash.  All of this contributes to the overall variability within the larger system. These are experiences individual short-lived individuals and annuals species will never know about.

We watch the sun rapidly falling from the sky, announcing the end of another day, and we are forced down the hill to get to our vehicle before darkness turns Matobo into a stage for the nocturnal critters to play their role.

Emile walks down in silence, guiding us, and I think about circadian rhythms. It is the pulse of life,  while lunar cycles pace out the months, adding up into years, and years becoming decades and decades accumulate into longer and longer time periods, making up time itself and we are in there somewhere.

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe. 

14. Reflecting Matobo

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - 

an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe.

I had a dog during a period of my life when I really needed a good friend. Although he died young, he helped me through the turbulent teenage phase, and he helped me well. Jack had an incredible and uncanny way to sense my mood. On those vibrant exuberant spring days so characteristic of the lowveld where I grew up, he would adjust his behavior either to complement or to accommodate mine. When I was happy Jack would bounce alongside me, panting in anticipation. When I was sad or lonely he would simply walk next to me, watching me, to be there for me, strong and powerful, the rock against which I could lean. When I sat at a waterhole watching a herd of impala drink, he would push his body right up against mine and lean his head on my shoulder with a wet nose in my neck, breathing gently onto my skin. That would have its magic effect on me and soon my mood would improve, and invariably Jack would run ahead in the footpath, towards home, happy with his personal achievement, wagging his tail because his master was in a better mood.

 Many years have past since I spent a real thought on Jack, that is until I got to know Matobo better. As with my dog, Matobo senses my moods and, more importantly, my needs. My mood is reflected in the atmosphere as I move through this incredible landscape. How is it possible that this place can easily mold itself around the emotional needs of a man, in fact of all the people there?

I go to Matobo as an escape from the sadness in me… and Matobo accepts me and reacts in a gentle way, offering me comfort and guiding me through the rough parts in my heart. He accepts me as I am without rejecting my negative emotions. Instead, he works with them and gently, gently makes me understand, accept and handle those emotions. Subtly, he shows me the blue sky and the new fresh leaves, a gust of wind may bring new smells and who can remain sad when you smell the first rain on dry soil?

I once went to Matobo to seek peace, cause I was angry at life, angry at what happened to my mother, angry that life is unfair and walked long and hard through the rocky landscape, and this time Matobo reflected my anger. Again my feelings were not rejected, simply accepted and dealt with. The thorns of the acacias ripped through my skin, bit into, and tore bits of leather from my shoes. The granite rocks, hot in the midday sun, reflected my own anger in heat, and where I had to lean against the rocks to regain my breath it burnt like the fury in me. The place was angry and he was not afraid to show me his anger. I sensed his immense anger and it shocked me into silence. I stopped to think. Was Matobo angry for my own reasons? Or was he angry because of his own reasons? Perhaps the grass that was burnt, the rhino that were poached or the gold panning in the rural areas, scarring its surface? No matter the reasons for his fury, I could feel it in the trees and rocks and boulders. I could hear it in his angry roars. The incessant cicadas were screaming it out in frequencies and decibels that befit the anger of the behemoth.

I thought about my own anger. I tried to justify it, fight it out, even screamed it out but my own human voice faded in the rocks and did not carry like the roar of a lion or the call of the fish eagle. It faded into insignificance and fell limp at my feet. I was defeated. Defeated by anger.

Matobo understood and allowed me space. Allow does not mean pamper. It does not mean he agreed and supported my anger. He only reflected it, showing me what it is, showing me the futility - the lion does not roar its anger, nor does the fish eagle call his anger over the echoing valleys. They communicate in peace and harmony, and therefore the valleys are prepared to perpetuate those good sounds, amplify them and echo them. But my anger was simply absorbed and muffled in the thick vegetation. There is no harmony in the voice of human anger!

Just as my dog many years ago coached me out of my anger, Matobo did it too. Once you vented your anger, fought the fury of it and the blood on your arms and legs dry up and can be scratched off, exposing the torn skin, then all you have from your blind fury is the burning sensation of thorns and nettles and abrasions from sharp unforgiving granite. The rage of fury at least brings some understanding, even if it is only the understanding of defeat.

Humbled by this experience I lay on my stomach amongst the ever-present lichens and let their brilliant colors permeate my heart and mind. Matobo, is like a great big mirror, a channel of vision straight into your heart and mind. In its wisdom it allows you to see yourself the way you are. It reflects the real you, and many times that is not what you want to see. For it is this image we have within us that we want to hide from the rest of the world.

Matobo however has a way to help you deal with it. At first it will show you who you are, what you look like, then it will allow you to go through your motions and tantrums… but slowly it will reel you in. You will walk out on top of a large rock/dwala, into the breeze. The anger will suddenly drain out of you, induced by the cool breeze in your face. You will breathe in deeply, perhaps for the first time today. Your mood will changes as you allow this place to guide you and mold you back into the shape you ought to be. Just allow it. Don’t fight it for longer than you need to. Bend your ways like the water bends the reflections of the reeds in the early morning. It will slowly bring you around the way the wind flows through the valleys, then it will show you the other side, the better side. The beauty within.

13. Matopos Symphony

Really good music is characterized by the story it tells and the depth of the story is often created by the punctuation - the silences between the important parts in which there is time for your imagination to color in the extra spaces. At first glance the boulders in Matopos seem to be randomly distributed but when you look carefully there is rhythm, rhythm in their distribution and placement. The huge stones provide the overall rhythm, while the smaller components, the clumps of trees and thicker vegetation along the drainage lines, provide the support music. Individual trees and grasses are the backstage singers and minor instruments and all of them contribute to an immense symphony…

Early morning, the orchestra members clean their instruments, gently tune them, and find their place on stage. When you wake up early, and perhaps go scratch amongst the embers to blow a little warmth into the fire, you hear them slowly, almost self consciously, initiating their role as young members of the cast. The other morning I was looking over the lake as the first light struck a chord on the still water. Almost at once a group of firefinches cleaned their tiny instruments and after a few haphazard attempts got their act together and were engaged in a predawn ensemble of soft melodious sounds, almost as soothing as the first warm coffee over my own hoarse voice. As their endeavors intensified and they became more bold, they seemed to trigger a series of other feathered musicians who either reluctantly started talking amongst each other like the guinea fowl or contributed more boldly like the early morning black colored barbet duet. And then the light on the black water reflects the sky and suddenly it is day and everybody contributes with great vigor.

It is an amazing time, when the orchestra is all settled and the conductor has that lovely expectant expression. He raises his hands and all is quiet. You know what is about to happen. The babblers have fallen from their midnight perches and drop to the ground in a great joyous chorus. The conductor’s hair fall over his face and he closes his eyes. On cue, a fish eagle calls and the trumpeters bring a earthly melancholy to the tune - this is the music of life! 

I walk down to the water and the mood changes. The sounds from the water birds are soft like the feathers of the cattle egret. The rhythmic wingbeats of some white-faced ducks sweep past in unison. They circle around as the conductor coordinates their flight and then a burst of whistles mixes with the sound of gently parting water as their aerial course transitions into the new medium. The music itself slowly changes. It becomes the gentle stuff you often hear in really good restaurants. Its there and it is good, but it does not penetrate the mind, only the heart.

Very little is out of place here. Even the barks of a distant troop of baboons are welcomed.  The piano man looks up and sensing the new mood produces a new gutsy rhythm and the young baboons climber over their rheumatism-ridden grandmothers who are searching for a spot of limelight to warm their old bony hips. An almost inaudible buzz draws my attention closer and a brightly dressed dragonfly warms his thorax muscles and prepares for his early morning aerial assault on some unsuspecting insect.

I realize my intense connection with this world. Each and every one of these sounds, like the love songs of our younger days, reminds me of an important phase or event of my life. The memories of a lifetime can be wrapped up in the sounds of a single day. The guinea fowl’s song belongs in the same place in my heart as my grandfather’s big hands, his smoky beard and the gentle laugh in his eyes as he used to guide me on my first hunts as a child. The rhapsody of frogs near the water takes me back to nighttime fishing with my father, quietly being together and satisfied with each other’s presence. The cattle egrets tell me of the not-so-distant Ndebele farmers, their cattle still safely in the wooden kraals. I see the steam being blown from their noses, their bells will begin to toll soon. Later today the cicadas will take me back to my days in the southern Kalahari, the incessantly hot and endless desert. I smiled deeply inside the first time a barking gecko announced its presence here in Matobo too. The high cry of the eagles takes me back to my days at university and my ornithologist friends with their falcons and eagles. Tonight the owls will take me back to my young boy-man days, alone in my own private outside room, a simple place with a corrugated iron roof, where I became a man listening to the owls and the nightjars, the air often punctuated with the calls of jackal or the lonely whoop of a hyena. That is the best part of my day, the night, when the large groups of musicians have gone to bed, and only the smaller quartet of owls and crickets play their chamber music while we sip deep red wine and let the stars keep score of the day’s events.