Mindful in the Botswana Bush

 

While many people took up new hobbies during the pandemic, making bread or knitting, I decided to cultivate my mindfulness and practice meditation. It started with a daily 10-minute meditation with the Calm app and evolved into an 8-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course over the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year holidays that met weekly for 2.5 hours, required daily hour-long meditations and culminated in a full day silent guided retreat. While it doesn’t sound that difficult to do a 45-minute body scan, just laying/sitting and “doing nothing” can be tricky. My mind is busy. I think about the past and plan for the future and just being here now can be a real challenge.

 

But on a recent Sunday trip into Moremi Game Reserve, it dawned on me that when we go to the bush we are routinely mindful. We are obviously intentionally looking for animals while driving and Moremi did not disappoint. While it was difficult to navigate the road network, because of the high rains many of the main “roads” (and by that I mean dirt tracks) are flooded, we made our way and saw many animals – zebras, elephants, giraffe, etc.

 

But mindfulness is more than just seeing, it is hearing the sounds of the birds and the wind in the trees as we find a quiet spot to have our lunch.

 

It is feeling the temperature changes over the course of a winter day that starts in the 40s and ends in the 80s, peeling off layers of clothing as the day progresses and adding them back on as evening falls.

 

It’s the full body nature of driving in the bush, feet used for clutch, gas pedal and brakes, arms for navigating your way around bushes and forcing the Land Cruiser into 4x4 when we hit heavy sand. It’s the full body experience of bumping down a calcrete road that has not been maintained due to a lack of tourists (every few months they normally drive a grader down the road to smooth out the corrugation but it seems like it hasn’t been done in a VERY long time). There so much jostling and bumping that my Fitbit insisted I did ~27,000+ steps that day despite the fact that I rarely left the passenger seat.

 

It’s the smells I wish I could replicate – the cat pee smelling wild sage, the sweet smell of elephant dung…

 

We can sit quietly for a very long time and watch ellies (what we call elephants) drinking and enjoying a mud bath. We listen to the sloshing and slurping as they make their way through the flood plain.

 

In addition to large things, like elephants and giraffes, we appreciate the small things like a baby sand grouse the size of a silly putty egg.

 

On the way back to Maun we see a stranded vehicle on the side of the road. The rattling roads have worn a hole in a pipe to the radiator and they cannot start their vehicle. We offer to tow the vehicle, guide and two Swiss tourists to the buffalo fence (a fence that divides the wildlife from the cattle). Here Paul performs his best “MacGyver” act and temporarily repairs the pipe using some glue, a thorn from a tree, an abandoned toilet paper roll and some duct tape. We follow them to make sure they arrive at their destination in one piece.

 

The last sighting of the day before the sun sets is a pack of wild dogs emerging from the bushes just off the side of the road. We are especially grateful for this sighting because we know that if we had just continued home without helping the stranded travelers, we would have never seen them. Thanks for that bonus sighting universe, it was much appreciated. It’s always good to be mindful, and grateful, in the bush.

 The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

---- Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

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