Speaking With Elephants
Speaking with Elephants – Short Version Speaking with Elephants – Long Version Speaking with Elephants – Addendum Additional Elephant writings: Intimate Nature Mandlovu
Speaking with Elephants – Addendum
ADDENDUM As Speaking With Elephants was originally edited with an eye to publishing it in a national journal, it was necessary to reduce its length considerably. What follows is a compilation of the sections that were removed for the sake of brevity. In the last years, I have been opening to the lives and presences of animals in ways that my culture forbids, and that western culture regards as superstitious, naïve , even heretical, entering into a healing idiom and language that involves the animals. Timber Wolf, who came into my life as if to enact this series of miraculous events first taught me that language during the fourteen years we lived together. As he aged, I began to call Timber the Buddha wolf because I saw that he was the bearer of great presence and...
Speaking with Elephants – Long
Long Version: I never expected to enter into an alliance with elephants and it has only been a few years since I have begun to imagine what an alliance with an animal might mean. One cannot enter into such a relationship unless one’s entire world of assumptions and beliefs has changed radically. One does not seek this out. The task is rather to avoid refusing it when it is offered. Such experiences, which shatter the known world, are familiar to each of us even though, for the most part, we enter these ordeals alone carrying the burden of having to make private meaning of them. Entering into an alliance with elephants, or with any other animal, was not what was difficult. Becoming the person who could engage with the natural world in such a way was another...
Speaking with Elephants-short
Short Version: I never expected to enter into an alliance with elephants and it has only been a few years since I have begun to imagine what an alliance with an animal might mean. One cannot enter into such a relationship unless one’s entire world of assumptions and beliefs has changed radically. One does not seek this out. The task is rather to avoid refusing it when it is offered. Such experiences, which shatter the known world, are familiar to each of us even though, for the most part, we enter these ordeals alone carrying the burden of having to make private meaning of them. Entering into an alliance with elephants, or with any other animal, was not what was difficult. Becoming the person who could engage with the natural world in such a way was another...
Elephants
Writings about Elephants: The Language of Relationship: Engagement with Elephants The Elephants are Calling Us Again Voices of the Elephants Speaking with Elephants
