July, 2024
I am on a rocky hilltop called Gideru in the Yaeda valley in Tanzania. Hamisi, my guide, is translating for me, and as the sun sets, I am talking with Gipo, Ai, Geriche, Loza, Mbuke and January…all from the Hadza hunter-gatherer tribe I have come to visit. I have wanted to be among hunter-gatherers since I was 28. I have wanted to part of nature since I was born. I‘m 74, and here I am. Sitting among them, looking at the western sky, I have a feeling that I have never experienced before except, perhaps, in my earliest childhood. This, what I see around me in the distance and in the near ground – the sky, the valleys, the lake, and these people – is the entire world. At this moment, what is around us is the universe, and this way of life as human beings is embedded in that world.
I think, “This must be preserved,” this sense of nature, these animals and plants and rocks here in East Africa, where we all come from. It is being encroached upon and threatened with disappearance and with it would disappear something precious and vital – something that is essential to our evolutionary past, and I think, our evolutionary future. Then there follows an irrational feeling: Whatever is here in their life and spirit and relationship with the world will persist and survive. And it will even come to blossom and be our future as well as our past.
It is only two days of my life, but I am, momentarily, content.
There is something reminiscent of the sunsets in my home in California, but something far different. Here, we are part of the land and the air and the water, part of the whole ecosystem. Here we are rooted in life. There, I am in a house, looking out at nature; I am not part of it. Yet here, with these people, I am, for an evening, very much part of it.
I know I am romanticizing terribly. The overall reality of their lives is undoubtedly difficult. But that said, I am not entirely idealizing. I have asked them if they are happy, and they are. I have asked them about their god, and they have told me about a god that is the world around us – the animals and the plants and the food and the shelter. They have asked me about mine. And I have said that though not everyone believes as I do, mine is about all of that. I sense it is the same god. Not a judgmental or punishing or vengeful god. One that is simply Life.
I’m 74. I’m a psychiatrist. I have sat with dozens of people in varying levels of health and distress. I have dabbled in music and poetry and science and brains and nervous systems and anthropology. I had a father who saved lives and also built a building that is a monument to life and the cosmos. Yet, as great as the monument is, it pales in comparison to this moment, these people, these plants, these animals. The monument is poetry, it is spirit, it is concrete and steel and sky and land and ocean. It is there to house an institution to study life. But what I know in Gideru is life.
I have a vision that whatever is here in Gideru can once again suffuse all life on this planet, including the teeming hordes of humans that now dominate it. I have put together a theory of how that can happen. And that is what I’m here to tell you about. One way or another.