The Bushmen Deliver a One-Word Teaching For the Planet
A Visionary Report
Last week Brad had three visionary dreams of walking with Bushman doctors in southern Africa. They brought us a teaching on the oldest wisdom and mystery of healing and transformation:
Hillary and I were traveling by foot across the Kalahari with our Bushman friends, laughing during the day while singing and dancing at night. The old n/om-kxaosi (doctors) were with us, as well as some young adults and children who had learned to read and write at school. One evening the elders gave us a teaching. It was so extraordinary that I woke up from the dream with excitement, trying to go over it in my mind to make sure I would remember it the next day. But the more I tried to remember what they said, the more it slipped away. So instead, I sang a song and eventually fell back to sleep.
In the next dream, we were still on the adventure. We were now making our way through an area filled with lions, leopards, hippos, baboons, mambas, crocodiles, and all the other animals of the wild. It looked like Kruger National Park in South Africa. The Bushmen now had a serious look on their faces, recognizing that our lives were facing danger in every direction. I woke up still feeling how it was to feel the possibility of death so close at hand. I was so shaken up that I now could barely remember any of the important teaching from the first dream. Again, I sang a song and fell back to sleep.
In the final dream, Hillary and I were again traveling by foot with the Bushmen. This time we were walking to an international conference at a major city, a place like Cape Town. There a gathering of indigenous elders from all around the globe had come to offer wisdom and guidance for the world. One by one a spokesperson from each culture gave an impassioned speech about the fragile condition of the earth and what must be done to save the planet. After all the other cultures had spoken and it was time for the conference to end, people realized they almost forgot that the Bushmen had not been heard. They had not chosen a speaker to represent them and hence they had been left off of the program.
Before closing the event, the moderator asked if the Bushmen had anything they’d like to say. All twenty of them immediately started walking to the main stage that was set up outside amidst the beautiful mountains overlooking the city. They did not step onto the stage but stopped just short of it. Then a young woman took an old woman’s dancing stick and wrote three letters with a slash mark on the ground: n/om.
None of the Bushmen wrote or spoke another word. They turned around and walked away, and together we started to make the long walking journey back home. Again, we laughed, sang, and danced all the way back. Hillary and I were unable to remember anything of what the Bushman teaching had been during the beginning of the journey. We laughed because it seemed not to matter, even if it did.
At the end of the dream, we were shown the book that had been published by the conference. Its cover was a collage of photos taken of all the speakers—a beautiful multicultural quilt made of people’s faces from all over the world. However, one image did not show a portrait. Instead it was a photo of the word the Bushmen had written on the earth: n/om. The book itself contained no speech or word from the world’s oldest living culture. But on the outside was a portrait of their ineffable wisdom, a mark on the earth that did not ask for peace, healing, communication, political action, spiritual intervention, or any recognizable abstraction. It was a name that pointed to something no one recognized or understood, though afterward many people insisted they grasped what the Bushman had meant.
The One-Word Teaching
N/om was the mysterious mark of the Bushman journey to and from the conference. If you hadn’t experienced that journey, n/om could not be understood. If you had, then you’d understand that there was no need to say anything at the gathering. The answer isn’t blowing in the windy talk that scatters the partial truths and platitudes that please the insatiable hunger of our trickster mind to be fed what we think we already know. The answer trembles inside when people celebrate what it means to be fully alive, something that took place during our musical walk where laughter, singing, and n/om dancing erased all linguistic and cognitive teaching.
When pressed to define n/om, we say that it is a blend of deep sacred emotion, spontaneous movement, and song. It is not one of these things, but all of them together at once. The Bushmen never say the word “n/om” whenever they actually feel it. Instead they use another word as a “respect name.” They warn that saying the primary word at such a time can make n/om so powerful that it might kill them. The unspoken but likely more important truth is that saying it also risks killing the n/om—turning its fire into ice. Perhaps in Brad’s dream the Bushmen implicitly knew that they should not step on the conference stage where what would be said and later read would kill the n/om fire needed for changing everything in need of change.
The word marked on the ground belonged to the earth rather than speech that cannot teach what must be felt in the melt of a holy climb up the rope to God. In spite of all the good intentions and truths spoken on stage, there was no n/om present. There wasn’t enough room for a n/om fire inside a gathering that only hosted talk, hoping the benevolent side of trickster could somehow be employed to battle its other malevolent side. This assumption—that better thinking and understanding is what brings change—stands in stark contrast to the Bushman way of transforming troubling situations. Without n/om, there is none of the mystical, musical, emotional life force required to turn talking into a different kind of walking.
The Bushmen left everyone wondering why they remained in the vibration of jubilation during their trip to and from the conference. In their walk was found no need for words. In the earth is similarly found the mark that invites you to embody what can only be felt, but never understood through language and thought alone. There is one teaching from the Bushman doctors that Hillary and I can never, ever forget: n/om. Everything else is a city slicker’s conference with big talk but too small a stage for the change that can only be brought by a Kalahari trembling, song-filled n/om fire.
-The Keeneys, April 30, 2019