Window to the Kalahari
We dedicate this essay to our friend and fellow n/om-kxao, /Kunta Boo, who just passed away this week. As the old Bushmen say, he’s now a star in the sky with a rope ready to be thrown down to earth for the next hungry heart ready to climb toward God.
Brad dreamed we took a group of people to the Kalahari:
We were in the near future and all the Bushman elders had passed on. Only children remained and a few younger adults who pretended they were n/om-kxoasi to please any tourists who passed through. I was sad to see what I feared someday would likely occur—the end of the old times when n/om was hunted, cooked, and lived for.
After watching a dance, most of the other travelers were in a hurry to get on a yellow school bus and return home, eager to tell their friends that they had danced with the Bushmen and now knew what n/om was about. I looked at my old guide, Paddy Hill, and we shook our heads and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the folly of introducing people to this culture that had so little to do with how everyone else thinks, feels, acts, interacts, and lives.
As folks were waiting for us to board the bus, Hillary and I noticed a building that had never been there before. It was a two-story schoolhouse that looked like it was built near the end of the 19th century. A few Bushman schoolchildren came up to meet us. One was singing an old Bushman song and her body was trembling in a natural way. She joined us as we went inside the building. We asked her how she had learned about n/om, only to find that she had never heard of that word. “But you are singing and trembling with a n/om song,” I replied. She looked completely puzzled and didn’t know what to say. Then she blurted out loudly and unpretentiously, “I love Jesus and I sing because I’m happy.”
In that moment, I remembered the conversations I had with Bushmen for over 30 years, including what they mentioned about the missionaries who had visited them. They regarded the first wave of missionaries as mentally deranged because they thought God existed on paper with ink on it, and even worse, they didn’t want to dance with God. Then later, a charismatic preacher showed up and he shook when he spoke of God. They recognized that he had n/om within him, along with some n/om songs, but were still confused because he wouldn’t dance with God around their dance fire.
The last time Hillary and I were in the Kalahari, most of the elders had joined a charismatic church and found it to be another place where n/om could cook—they added that venue to their places for spiritual cooking. Now, in the dream after the elders had gone on, n/om was embodied in a child, but its name had faded away. I felt both the grief of something lost and the joy of remembering that n/om never dies as long as the song, emotion, and tremble are alive in the body. It doesn’t matter what name inspires it.
Opening the Window
Before leaving the schoolhouse, we noticed a staircase that went to its highest floor. We climbed it and saw that a few Bushman children and Guild members had arrived. They followed us upstairs. There were no chairs or furniture in that room—it was a wide-open space. The window to our left was open. Strangely the right side of the room was dark and invisible. On the back wall was another window that had been sealed and nailed shut. I instinctively knew that this window must be immediately opened. Picking up a sharp spear-like object left on the floor, I tried prying the window open. It took so much effort that I feared I’d break a pane. I was relentless and determined to get that window open, and I finally did.
After the window was opened, I stepped back to look at the room again. A fresh breeze came through and I felt we were outside again. In that moment I noticed a strange sloping shape at the bottom of the window. It was like a backrest whose base was on the floor with its top tapered to fit against the bottom of the window. It was clearly made for someone to sit underneath the window. Oddly, the chair was entirely made of mud.
I smiled as we realized that this was the only thing in the schoolhouse that had been made by the Bushmen. The rest of the structure had been constructed by European colonists. I decided to sit down and try out that unusual backrest. I found that its angle of recline was designed so that a person’s head would outside the window when they sat down. My body was in the schoolhouse and my head was under the vast Kalahari sky.
Ancestors in the Sky
Suddenly nighttime fell and the sky filled with stars. They twinkled as I felt them become the Kalahari ancestors I longed for and missed. I was flooded with emotion—not mine, but theirs. The ancestors expressed gratitude and joy for all the teaching we had shared over the years. In a split second I recalled the odd way my fieldwork had been conducted in the Kalahari. I would shake with the elders all day and slip into First Creation dreams at night. The next morning I’d share my visionary adventure.
Nothing made the elders happier than these reports. They’d say, “You remind me of my grandparents and the old n/om-kxaosi and how they used to talk about n/om. It makes our hearts very happy.” Though I never felt I was teaching them anything, I recognized the miracle of how singing, dancing, and trembling with them enabled a passage to the ancestors who sent a teaching to the village through me. My job was to bring it back from the other side. I then stood up and looked at Hillary who was weeping and smiling with me. I told her,
“Our work has been for the ancestors. They are the ones who can’t wait to see what fish we caught to feed them. We are fishing and cooking for them. Let us never be discouraged by those wanting to avoid the schoolhouse, its upper floor, its teachings, and its homework. We are doing this for the spiritual mothers and fathers who taught us how to deliver the mail and cook the meal.”
The other Bushman children and visitors were still in the room, but now everyone had blended together, no longer differentiated by skin color or cultural origin. We had all entered First Creation in the upper room and were hungry to cook with the ancestors in the sky.
That’s when Hillary and I realized that the old ways are not done and gone. They come back whenever you enter the right room and reach for them on the other side of the window. Don’t put your head through the window in the familiar way, otherwise you might only look down and see the ground below. Get the right angle provided by the Bushman seat made of the earth that orients your gaze toward the sky, like the former Bushmen who danced on the backs of their ancestors to create the rope to God.
As we celebrated the never-ending circling of n/om wisdom, the whole room became as dark as the right side had been before. The stars in the sky then zoomed into the room, filling it with flickering lights like fireflies on a summer night. The ancestors had come back. They are here in this otherworldly schoolhouse, delivering us teaching words that require you take a bite and allow study time to help you digest. The visionary teachings are the compacted wood chips needed to help start a fire. They are also the holy bread and the mystical prayer cake.
At the end of the dream. I went back to the window again and looked at the sky. I saw Jacob’s ladder going all the way to heaven. My eyes walked up each step until I reached the top. There I again saw the luminous light that started this whole adventure many years ago when I was 19. Like a flash of lightning, it then changed to a fog of light and I knew it was time to return.
Welcome to the Kalahari Classroom
Sacred Ecstatics has doubled its mission. We ecstatically venture to the other side in order to both receive and share the teaching that requires two sides working together—all of us on this side and the ancestors on the other. Welcome to the highest Kalahari classroom. Open a window to let in the ancestors and get ready to be a good learner, burner, and receptive vessel.
Don’t get lost in preferences for names and cultural frames, don’t fuss about verbal versus nonverbal forms, and don’t miss the everyday work that leads to eternal play, or you’ll miss catching the feeling for the way First Creation changing is what keeps everything alive. It’s time to gather and blend, not only the spiritual cooking ingredients,* but all the people from everywhere who truly long to be in the upper room to receive the transforming teaching gifts from the ancestors still alive, kicking, and cooking in the village of the sky.
-The Keeneys, June 14, 2020
*See our book, The Spiritual Engineering of Sacred Ecstasy.
For some photos of /Kunta Boo, visit FB or Instagram.