The Wonder Safaris by Adam Levin - African Wisdom - my tribe - creative NoMads
double entendre intentional on NoMads.
Recommended read - The WONDER SAFARIS by Adam Levin
Extract
Preface:-
I am growing weary of life in this jungle. This savage hunting for money and things.
This relentless gathering in plastic supermarket packets.
This drumming on dark disco floors.
Perhaps it is time to walk again.
To walk until my feet turn a tar road back to dirt.
Till my garden grows wild as savannah and my dogs run free as wolves.
Then one day perhaps, when the last wounded cries of burglar alarms are but whimpers, we will hold hands around a sulphurous neon blaze of cars, shoes and cheque books.
We will roast our television sets and the frantic babbling of talk show hosts will fill the universe.
But first we must learn to walk.
I’ve been thinking lately about something Einstein said: that the world is either all miracles or no miracles at all, depending on how you look at it.
I know there are miracles all around me: on pavements, in shopping trolleys, petrol pump attendants.
But gradually, trapped in thre sameness of this city, I have grown blind to their powers.
Somewhere in the garish, deodorized supermarket of modern life, I have misplaced my miracle eye - and with it, my sense of wonder.
My gut sags with the weight of urban sensory overload.
My heart goes hungry.
Again, I must learn to eat. Life.
Sometimes I feel myself drowning in this sea of convenience. Too much, too fast and all too available.
And when I stumble across a miracle, it is only because some silly, wayward cog has slipped out of place in the big, shiny machine.
Magic does not flourish easily on the urban factory floor - it shrivels, blooming only in our accidents and mistakes.
And it is only when we fuck up that we hear, ever so faintly and briefly, the primal, chaotic splutterings of the universe again.
The wet gurgling of the womb. The ancient chatter of mermaids. The ever- cracking flames of immortality.
Lunatics can hear those sounds. In fact, I suspect they thump away in the ears of all those we cast off as naive and helpless - those too old, too young or too poor to matter.
And the further away from the world one wanders, of course, the louder those rhythms will become.
Way out there, on bad roads, in broken towns and cruel states, there are deep souls who are very much alive.
Because, for all the conveniences and technologies they lack, in the simple quietude of their lives they have remembered how to listen with open ears: how to tune their eardrums to the great primal wireless broadcasting from the belly of the earth - neither missing a sound, nor distinguishing one from another.
They hear the whole planet, I am told. And their palms are chafed with earth songs. And magic turns their eyes to light bulbs.
Listen, if you will. Listen to all the weird languages in the world being spoken at once. Just imagine opening your ears deep and wide enough to really hear that sound, and to hear rhythms that emerge from its chaos. There are some who believe the answers to all riddles in the universe are written in those rhythms, and the more I learn, the more I am one of them.
Again, I must learn to listen. For with each day in this jungle, I grow deafer.
I shuffle through the quick, glorious dance of evolution, and yet I fear I might be dying.
For nowadays, I scarcely recognize those rhythms when I hear them.
I have stopped speaking in miracles - stopped listening out for them - and so it’s natural, I suppose, that they should cloister themselves behind the drab, ordered curtain of modern life.
I sense a shiver of anarchy surfing my spine. The nerves of some insane geography begin to tingle.
I am hungry for miracles and surprises right now.
I am starving for the taste of my own senses.
Take me to my teachers.
To those whose hearts still thump with exquisite beats of faith.
Those whose beliefs have not yet vanished in the name of science and money and power.
Those wayward and forgotten animists, for whom every atom in the universe is ripe with spirit and meaning.
Tell me their tales.
Fold my body through their gestures.
Let me feel the shapes of their lives in my knees and elbows. The textures of their plams.
And let me un-know what I know so well. So I, too, can be “WonderFull”.
What a world we’re making.
A world that explains itself so eloquently, it has forgotten how to sense or feel.
A world that stutters so on the grammar of true sensuality that nowadays, if I am to grease my miracle tongue, I must pay the price of long and hardy pilgrimage.
I must wander widely, into faraway cracks of the earth; and deeply, immersing myself, shivering, into hostile, murky pools of otherness.
I must forsake this urban desert and flee to some exotic ramshackle metropolis, where I have a chance of reversing the cycle.
Where my English might lose its currency, and the rich languages of miracles and surprises might bury themselves in my gums.
But where?
I shuffle through the messy flip-charts of my memory.
I run my fingers over the palms of my hands for clues.
I search my palate by tongue.
Already, there is so little left of the planet.
As we speak, the fat merchants of the tourist trade are sweeping the earth, herding with them their droves of shallow holiday cattle, swathed in sunscreen and “No Problem” T-shirts. No problem?
Sure, no problem while the lost world still harbours miracle crannies for our refugee.
No problem while there are still lands too thorny and remote for such lazy and mediocre beasts.
But come quickly, for we must learn to wander.
You know the deal in this cosmos: you wait too long, it disappears.
