The enormous chasm between what we are learning about the nature of the world and what we can understand, that distance between the two is not a factor to preoccupy us, because once we touch in any way we are eternally connected, and so nothing is separate from anything else, though each one of us is entirely distinct from all others.

Let me suggest that we give up relying on simple versions of cause and effect, or that one thing leads inevitably to another or that we can trace and measure that interaction. Consider resonance instead. That events vibrate continuously, that we are drawn into a vast harmony with which we can make music eternally, unless we continue being afraid of and overwhelmed by beauty. To be in accord with the true nature of the world, we have to yield. In the perfect dance, we lead and follow each other, and then all others simultaneously. That is how the Elephants live. That is their nature. I yielded to them and so I learned yielding. And now Bears. But not dancing bears, not those tortured to dance for some perverted entertainment we seek, oblivious to another’s suffering. That’s not what is meant by dance!

Something is being born. I mean this literally if not chronologically. Léonie is not a fiction, Lucas is not a fiction. I am not, this Writer is not making up a story. Look, it is happening, right there. Their manifestation cannot be dismissed as a mere act of imagination. Not when the Imagination is a real world. I am not willing to say that Léonie is a fiction, nor that Léonie wouldn’t exist without me. Like the proverbial question: Has a tree fallen in the forest if no one has heard it? You bet it has. The question points to our great delusion that humans are the center of the universe and nothing exists without us. This self-centeredness, this narcissism may partly be responsible for the dire fate of the Earth. Would I exist without Léonie? Yes and no. Maybe in another life. But not in this life, because she calls this life, this moment, into being. Does Léonie exist without me, that is, independent of me? Seems very likely except that you would not know about her existence in the same way. As the Writer, I don’t give her life; I give you access to her life. And so I give her access to you.

I presume that is why I have been given the responsibility of recording his as it comes to view. While I am not affecting the action or the story in any way, we are still profoundly interconnected. Is this a mirror of the way life and the natural world really work though we have been given to believe that cause and effect are much more direct and able to be traced?

To what purpose? We can’t answer that because we don’t know where this is going, only what is appearing, only what is being revealed in the way the Przewalski’s horses entered this text a few pages ago, came out of nowhere, a year and a half after it began. It isn’t easy, not only because I don’t understand and don’t know what is coming but because the forms, shapes, sounds and thoughts in this realm don’t translate into words perfectly. And yet it is my task to bring them forth.

Welcome to the mysterious tangle of spiritual intelligence, intent and the unknowable.

I feel compelled to repeat certain words—mysterious, inexplicable, unfathomable, incomprehensible. It is the consequence of standing at this juncture of what is real where events and occurrences are entirely mysterious, inexplicable, unfathomable and incomprehensible, where the nature of reality shifts so entirely that it seems our minds must break from the impact of it. So we shatter and put ourselves together again, but most tentatively and in a different configuration. One we can’t predict.

This is the way it was when Galileo asserted that the Earth was not the center of the universe. That was an earthquake! Or when we had to understand that matter isn’t solid, and that the laws of physics and the laws of quantum mechanics are different.

Now the contemporary tsunami: the human being is not the center of the universe. The human is not the purpose and pinnacle of evolution; there are other species who carry great intelligence, even greater intelligence than ours. They carry spiritual development in ways we cannot imagine, that we lack the capacity to perceive, let alone judge. Maybe humans are the equivalent of a small if awesomely beautiful Earth revolving in a third orbit around a small sun in a universe of billions and billions of such suns. While it may be that life as we know it, that sacred enigma, is rare in the universe, life doesn’t necessarily imply human, or even earthly. There well may be a myriad wondrous forms wiser than we are, that we cannot fathom because we are unable and unwilling to acknowledge what is beyond our benighted and very dangerous selves. Because we are not capable, because our minds have not encompassed reality.

I am reminded of looking down while flying in a small plane at about 12,000 feet across the desert in Namibia and seeing patterns on the Earth that I had first seen in the art of Aboriginal people, which I thought then were abstract images until I realized the artists or dreamers understood things I did not and were rendering the meaning of the landscapes they saw, physical and interior, through their visionary art, however it was that they came to be flying, and so able to see the design. The parallels are so exact, it’s as if the Aboriginal artists have indeed flown across this territory, or that their desert landscapes look enough like this desert that when they fly this is what the spirit world reveals to them. The physical appearance isn’t just happenstance. It develops over millions, billions of years, but physical evolution doesn’t explain the configurations. There are other levels that just begin to reveal themselves to seers like those artists whose work we can admire but cannot yet—I don’t see any evidence we can—understand. We do not see what they see. Layers missing. Levels of understanding.

But meditating upon their art, I understood things I couldn’t say in words. The same for this terrain through which I am flying now. The Aboriginal people will fully understand, no words needed.

I can’t ask La Vieja—it would be rude and intrusive—but I do wonder what La Vieja sees. Is she learning to see with the unique perception of the Aboriginal or other Indigenous peoples? 

Two San people accompanied us to Chobe to meet the Ambassador in 2006 and while we, the non-Indigenous people were awed by what transpired, because it was the third time we had witnessed Elephants approaching us with clear intent to transmit something specific of great importance, the San were not impressed. They live in such a world of relationship and interconnection that reveals itself to them consistently and, yes, now also to those of us who are willing to see.

Having just met, Léonie and Lucas are in their own world in a small enclave of possibility, examining each other and their close surroundings, the trees, rocks, wildflowers, but not even those, not yet. Light, yes, the sun will set soon. They are aware of the light, they both seem to move slightly to gather onto themselves what light comes through the trees. They move to the light the way boughs move in the wind.

They arrived in time. Some wind, not much, enough for vitality. A breeze. Soft. Enough to feel and hear the life of the forest. And flashes of blue sky through the slightly moving limbs of the pine and spruce. He is more interested in her than anything in their surroundings, and at this mo- ment particularly her hands. She is, she said, a stone mason.

“I build walls,” she had said. “Free standing. So you can walk around them,” she said. “They often have free-standing arches constructed without mortar. Always without mortar. They serve no purpose except to be themselves. We acquire the stones from wherever we could find them after they had been moved from their original home. My task is to return them to themselves but visibly so they confront us.

“They stand firmly by the way the stones fit onto and so into each other. Sometimes there is earth between them, softening their edges, but mostly, the stones are simply placed, one on another, skin to skin. No mortar to fix them in place while still keeping them apart. Each time a stone is placed, it has to fit perfectly as if it could not be anywhere else, but where it is, upon the stone that has been waiting for it, and between the stones to the side, each perfectly suited to the other.”

She was moving her hands when she spoke as if she was before the wall and placing a stone. She had closed her eyes and bowed her head slightly looking in the dark to see the wall as it might be, scanning the pile of rocks, choosing the one that would go in this place and no other, having been taken once from its original home, she had to find another home for this life that stretched before it. It had been uprooted and she had to set it in place, had to restore and affirm the intrinsic relatedness of the universe that prevails in every quanta of the 7.3 trillion light years of the dimension of the universe. She was building a world.

It is odd, he is thinking, that she would build walls, work with stone, with the unmoving, when it seems she, herself, is always moving slightly, adjusting, affiliate with what is arising, entering, leaving.

“It may not be realistic,” she continued, when she opened her eyes and leaned back upon him again, “but I want to find the stone people homes they will cherish forever. Building a wall, means bringing the stones home. That’s why I do it.” met.

He determined then to be such a home for her though they had just

“The walls you build,” he asked, “standing alone, aren’t they lonely? Or the stones at the top, exposed as they are, aren’t they lonely? Or precarious?”

“They have weather. The foundation has earth and the capping has sky and there are always the birds that land and the squirrels and other creatures who scamper across them. The stones have weather and there is always the company of the trees. They are not alone in the world.”

The two of them had been alone in the world and now, it seemed they were not.