Desert elephants are few in Africa, but their story is analogous to human hope, and a spirit of utter perseverance through circumstances drastically destructive to life.
Bush elephants
perpetually walking
Namibian deserts
slogging for hours
through oceans
of tidal heat…
How much do we want to not only physically live on, but how much do we want to know mystical union with God? To have faith worth dying and living for? What will we do to struggle for a breath if we are caught underwater?
marching
to a wavering
horizon of hope
before death’s
final fire descends
from infinite skies
upon the majestic
magnificent tragedy
of this absolute
passion to live on
one more step…
These elephants stretch finite perseverance to the limit and beyond. They epitomize a kind of animal-hearted passion for the next breath, the next step. They do not go passively into the night, but fulfill their destiny of survival.
quite indefatigable
& unrelenting enough
for such daunting
survival daily
until the dyings.
We humans crave life, but life with more dimensions and depth than these amazing elephants. Besides physical survival, we ache and long for experience of the sacred, for being loved by and loving others, and our God, for the seeds of eternity hidden in our daily lives. In the Bible and ancient times, the desert was the place to encounter both the devil and God, a fierce place of extremes where no distractions exist and the reality of being alive must be faced radically and in the stark fullness of truth.
We are humans of the desert in search of not only some meager fruit and leaves, and some water, but of what love really is, of what our finite and eternal destinies are. Along the way we write poetry in the sand that is soon covered and gone. But in the act of creating those poems, we became more aware of what and who we are. Unlike the desert elephants, we can realize we are meant for God, here and always.
What will we do with our greatest longing? Will we slog through the desert of infernal obstacles with hope and faith? Will we risk everything to breathe underwater, and find a way through the ocean of the desert, if God is both waiting for us and heading towards us?