19. Thatch

19.  Thatch

I see them walking home through the sultry shadows of the ghommos at the end of a long day;

it’s the end of winter, the grass is ripe. Ready.

Measuring their paces like someone documenting a long journey,

they head home.

Thick thatch, bundled burdens, carried on their heads, supported by proud necks and elegant shoulders.

They move graciously like their own shadows, holding their heads high.

In spite of the load, there is a lightness in their hearts,

carrying it with dignity and carrying it with pride. 

It will bring warmth on cold winter nights

and it will be cool on hot summer days.

Simple thatch. Twined together like vibrant families into larger communities. 

Labour of love.

They sing and cut and sing and measure and then,

all at once, stamp them into shape.

All the edges aligned: from grass to thatch. 

Labour of duty. 

On their straight backs and proud shoulders they carry, and they sing,

and they sweat,

and they ache

and they laugh

A baby is born, and the golden thatch will proclaim their joy;

a bright new life

a new hut,

a new place.

The baby will grow, and become a man, an old man.

With him the thatch will fade, its colour lost.

Its purpose may remain for many seasons and many harvests

but at the end it will be, like the old life, replaced.

Amongst the songs and dances the young and fresh will replace the old and the wise.

Dexterous hands will merge branches into poles and grass into thatch

to weave a roof as strong as a nation.

All together.

Grass to thatch to roof. Sheltering life, and transitioning nature into homes;

from the earth the mud will rise into walls structured by poles to strengthen

and carry the heavy loads being brought in on proud necks and elegant shoulders.

A calf is born and stands for the first time in the moonlit night.

The young heifer will lick him, love him, support him

and the life of the herd bull will begin here and now, on this cloudless night.

Somewhere distant a dog barks and a lonely drum measures the journey of life.

Until morning.

A fresh bucket of water is brought to the surface by the tender muscles of adolescent girls,

laughing and spilling water in the sand; their shy smiles offer me some,

and I wash my sunburnt face in the cool of the water and think of the thatch:

 a similar coolness, the rich smell of water from the earth. 

Through the water in my eyes, I see the oxen harnessed to a plough,

and soon the soil will be turned and its rich smell will announce its receptiveness.

Ripe. Ready. For the seeds to germinate.

It will harbour and nourish a crop, if the rains are good.

They duck down into thick grass where no bold man will go, where leopards and snakes may linger

 in the shade of the tall grass.

Labour of love. Labour of duty;

to provide shade and warmth, protection from the sun.

Thatch.

They sing and they cut and measure and they stamp grass into thatch.

And they smile and they wave, as we drive past

into our future, leaving them in our past.

They are memories, etched in my mind forever. 

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.