Adapting the words of Active Hope facilitator Madeleine Young
Choose – or create – a space that you can repeatedly go to – a place where you can be quiet and receptive and listen to the world. Ideally this will be a spot in Nature, but it is more important that it is a place that is easily visitable by you, and it is entirely possible to create your ‘Nature spot’ inside your home. Make it somewhere that you feel safe and can relax.
There are many ways to refer to this place – it could be your listening spot, your Nature spot, your Gaia spot, your sit-spot, or whatever feels right for you. This is your place to acknowledge the greater whole that you are a part of. Set aside an amount of time that you are going to spend at your spot. We suggest starting small, to make it achievable that you spend time there each day. Each time you arrive at your spot, relax, breathe, feel yourself in your body, and practice engaging your senses – look, listen, feel, smell (possibly even taste, if you have chosen a spot where edible things are growing!) – be receptive to all the details. If you feel fidgety or unsettled at first, or your mind is full of thoughts, just observe this, without judgement, and keep gently bringing yourself back into your senses. This practice is about building up receptivity and relationship over time and not about seeking to come too readily to clarity. Whilst at your spot, you could try slowing your movements right down, as this is a great way to signify to yourself that this is a space outside of your everyday. Allow yourself to be playful – let your imagination be wide open, like a satellite dish, and let your critical rational mind take a back seat while you are here. As much as you can, let go of expectations, as communication from the greater whole may come in unexpected ways.
Let your relationship with your spot develop over time – returning as regularly as you can. Just as with any relationship, you will need to get to know each other first and may start off ‘making small talk’ – with invested time together, your intimacy will begin to deepen. This practice is all about making ourselves available, being quiet, and listening. If it feels useful, you could try out sentence starters, like these, while listening at your spot: If our world could speak to me, what it might say is… If the collective intelligence of our world were to guide me, what it might invite me to consider is…
Personal Reflection There is the doing of this practice – actually turning up, repeatedly, at your spot – but, also, there’s a potential for reflection on the practice, enabling any guidance to ripple out by exploring it further in different ways. Journaling, drawing or doodling, can be a great tool here – either whilst at your spot, or after. Let your hand take over and create whatever feels to come without overthinking it- colours, or mandalas can be particularly powerful to play with.
Background The “Listening to Our World” practice is situated within the third stage (or station) of the spiral of “the Work that Reconnects”. In the first stage, we developed strong roots through experiencing and expressing our gratitude and appreciation for life. One aspect of experiencing such appreciation is a deeper knowing of our interconnectedness. This knowing is deepened further still in stage 2 of the Spiral of the WTR, when we honour our pain for the world – welcoming it as a sign of our ability to feel with this world – a world that we are an integral part of. This third stage: ‘Seeing with New and Ancient Eyes’, is all about inviting in a fresh perspective. In a way, by experiencing this integrated nature of our human experience, we have already been ‘seeing with new (and ancient) eyes’. Living with an awareness of our interconnectedness is a radical shift in perspective from the separate view of ourselves that is encouraged within ‘business as usual’. As we step into stage 3 of the spiral, we are deepening this shift in perspective. In this practice, we are encouraged to begin to dedicate some time and space, within our daily lives, to receive guidance. This is based on an understanding that we are part of a complex living system and that there will be aspects of this system that may wish to emerge through us. By ‘listening to our world’ we begin relating to Nature, like a good family member – acknowledging our belonging, and cultivating an understanding of it by just being quiet and letting insights surface.
amaMpondo environmental defenders on South Africa’s Wild Coast bring the same spirit of resistance to extractive mining interests today as their forebears did to the apartheid state in the 1960s.
Their connection with the land, and the customs that underpin this, makes them mindful custodians of the wilderness.
The amaMpondo say they welcome economic development, but want it on their own terms, many preferring light-touch tourism over extractive mining.
The amaMpondo’s worldview and values are passed down through the generations through the oral tradition.
MPONDOLAND, South Africa — The day the prospectors came, so did the storm. It was 2007, and clouds barreled toward the coast, driven by a wind that churned up dust and foretold of the downpour to come. Beyond the rusty dunes, the Indian Ocean surged with equal force.
“It was scary,” says Mamjozi Danca, a traditional healer who has lived here all her life.
Her family couldn’t bring the cattle in from grazing, and “even cooking wasn’t easy.” They hunkered down in their rondavel, a round homestead with a thatched roof not far from the mineral-dense dunes of Xolobeni on South Africa’s Wild Coast, to wait it out.
Xolobeni is a village on a 24-kilometer (15-mile) stretch of wilderness about four hours’ drive south of the port city of Durban. It has become synonymous with a two-decade-long fight by the Indigenous amaMpondo against extractive mining interests that had sights on the powdered titanium in the dunes. There have also been more recent attempts to conduct seismic surveys for offshore oil and gas.
When traditional healer Mamjozi Danca was born into a violent apartheid state that tried todispossess her people of their land and culture, the amaMpondo fought back. Now they are fighting to protect their heritage from mining corporations. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.Herbalists burn imphepho, African sage (Helichrysum odoratissimum), as an incense during prayer. This fragrant herb grows wild in the Mpondoland grasslands. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.
On the day the mining prospectors came for their sand samples, the storm drove them away, Danca says. It was frightening. But it was a sign, she says, a miracle even.
This, by her interpretation, was the spirits of the ancestors bringing a message to the people, using the vocabulary of the elements.
“If we allow [mining], [we] will never be able to access any medicine, the beach, the sea, or food,” Danca says. According to her, it was a message of solidarity: we, your forebears, will fight alongside you, the living, who are protecting our ancestral lands.
When the government later granted a prospecting license to Mineral Sand Resources, an Australian company, the community challenged its legality in court, resulting in the license being suspended.
The spirit of resistance to these would-be profiteers is the same one that fueled the amaMpondo’s fight against the apartheid government in the 1950s and early 1960s, sources tell Mongabay. And it is their connection with “the land” — the web of life that surrounds them, and where the spiritual world is said to exist — that environmental defenders say they are willing to die for.
Some already have.
The amaMpondo want economic development, but on their own terms, with many preferring light-touch tourism over extractive mining. Some families offer rustic catered accommodation for hikers trekking up and down the coast, such as here at the popular Mtentu River mouth. Image courtesy of Travis Bailey/Siyasizisa Trust.
Nature: Where the living and the spirit realm meet
It’s no accident that this place is well preserved, the locals say. Their custodianship has kept it this way.
The land is their mother, they say; it is their identity, something they respect. In their belief system, the land owns the people; the people don’t own the land.
When the amaMpondo speak of “the land,” they aren’t referring merely to the soil beneath their feet, which can yield X bushels of corn that can be sold for Y dollars at the market.
They’re talking about the rains that roll in on a storm, and the water filtering into the wetland where the grass aloes grow. They’re talking about the springs where they collect bathwater, the grasslands where their herds graze, and where they gather plants for medicines and mystical charms. They speak of the forests that burst with fruit, and offer firewood or timber. They mean the rivers that run into the ocean where they cast their fishing lines, and the fish that nourish them.
Xolobeni’s rusty titanium-rich coastal dunes are synonymous with the amaMpondo’s 20-year battle to keep extractive mining out of their ancestral lands. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.
The Pondoland Centre of Endemism is globally recognized for its unique plant diversity, with rarities such as the Pondoland coconut (Jubaeopsis afra), the Pondoland conebush (Leucadendron pondoense) and the Pondoland ghost bush (Raspalia trigyna).
It is also here, in nature, where the amaMpondo connect with the spirit realm.
The amaMpondo’s spiritualism is a blend of African animism and Christianity. They say that when someone dies, their spirit doesn’t go away to a far-off realm — a heaven, or hell, or a cycle of reincarnation — but lingers close by, staying near to places they loved when they were here in their physical bodies.
“Those who have passed on cling to the places close to their hearts,” says Sinegugu Zukulu, a conservationist, ecological infrastructure expert and Indigenous knowledge specialist. “Just like living people are everywhere, so are those who have passed on.
“There are those who reside in the ocean,” Zukulu says, “some are in the mountains. Some reside in waterfalls; some in beautiful, peaceful pools; some in forests.”
Everything is said to be a being. That means protecting individual species and the ecosystems in which they occur — the grasslands, forests, rivers and ocean — is as much about ensuring people can meet their daily needs as it is about protecting the spiritual places where they connect with the numinous.
To understand this, Zukulu says, a person must witness their daily practices.
Traditional healer Malibongwe Ndovela collects plants for medicines and mystical charms that grow in the grasslands and forests at the Mtentu River mouth, a popular overnight stop for hikers. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.
A walk through the grasslands uncovers the medicinal plants tucked away among the grazing, which explains why they won’t plow all the virgin land. Most of the natural veld remains intact, with just a few small vegetable beds for each family.
Healers only collect bark from the north-facing side of a medicinal tree, so it doesn’t die.
“In customary law, we are not allowed to cut down fruit-bearing trees,” Zukulu says, “because they give food to wildlife, like birds, bees and insects, and to strangers on long journeys.”
Out of respect for the ancestors, and the need to keep in good standing with them — ancestors are said to have the power to punish, if someone strays — conservation practices take the shape of a ritual or lore, becoming practical while being imbued with the metaphysical.
Losing their land to extractive development will break these lores and customs, they say.
But fighting to protect their way of life has come at a cost.
Traditional healers use the smoke from the coals of a yellow wood tree (Podocarpus latifolius) to cleanse a cattle herd of problematic spirits and stop the animals from fighting. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.
In 2016, a community leader with the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC) — which, together with civil society organization Sustaining the Wild Coast (SWC), helped spearhead the legal challenges to the titanium mine and other extractive development efforts — was killed. Sikhosiphi “Bazooka” Rhadebe was shot in a suspected hit linked with resistance to the titanium mine. His death has not been thoroughly investigated and his killers remain at large. Zukulu and fellow activist Nonhle Mbuthuma, another ACC leader, found their names on a purported hit list that began circulating before Rhadebe’s murder, believed to be issued by a person or people in the community who were pro-mining.
This hasn’t stopped the community. Now they continue with a protracted legal battle against the energy giant Shell, which planned offshore seismic surveys about 770 km (480 mi) south of Xolobeni to find oil and gas. So far, they’ve kept Shell’s prospecting license application snarled up in legal proceedings. Meanwhile, in April 2024, Zukulu and Mbuthuma received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for the community’s efforts to thwart Shell.
The legal case centers around more than just the potential environmental impacts of the sonic blasting, such as injury to sound-sensitive marine life like dolphins, whales and the near-extinct African penguin (Spheniscus demersus).
The amaMpondo argue that it’s also a threat to their cosmology.
“Shell’s disruption of the ocean risks disrupting and disturbing those who have passed on, and the living don’t know what it may lead to in their lives,” Zukululu says.
It is no accident that Mpondoland is well preserved, the locals say. Their custodianship has kept it this way. They want economic development, but on their own terms, with many preferring light-touch tourism over extractive mining. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.
Remembering hard times
Today, Mamjozi Danca is in her 60s. Like most of her generation, she doesn’t have a precise calendar date for her birthday, but uses the oral tradition to mark her arrival in the world.
She was born, her father told her, when the amabulu, the soldiers, stormed into their home, ripped off people’s jewelry and amulets, and looted the kitchen for food. This was the kind of intimidation tactic that the state used to bully the amaMpondo to submit to a national land-grab policy that aimed to push the country’s majority Black population into reserves and keep the country’s best farmlands for the minority white elite.
Part of this included imposing “betterment schemes” on Indigenous communities that were intended to upend traditional governance structures and communal land and grazing customs. State-sponsored chiefs drove wedges between communities. Extractive taxes forced Indigenous men to head to the mines, mostly in Johannesburg, as part of a conveyor belt of exploitative migrant labor.
The amaMpondo may not live solely off the produce of their farms, but being able to keep animals and grow vegetables and maize goes a long way towards boosting their food resilience. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.
The amaMpondo were having none of it, rising up in a peasant resistance to this violent and illegitimate state in the 1950s and early 1960s. The culmination of the Mpondo Revolt came on June 6, 1960, when a group gathered at Ngquza Hill, not far from Xolobeni. The military flew in, dropped tear gas and gunned down 11 people. In the months that followed, the state hunted down and arrested others believed to be complicit, sentencing 30 to death for their part in the uprising.
It was into this maelstrom that Danca was born.
Today, Danca, a member of the ACC, is defiant. The amaMpondo were fighting to protect their land and way of life during the revolt; now they’re fighting the same system that wants to dispossess them of their inheritance today.
“I will never give up. I will never stop fighting,” she says.
Stories keep customs and cosmology alive
On the day the helicopters came, before Christmas 1960, Nozilayi Gwalagwala clutched her newborn boy as she felt the pah-pah-pah-pah-pah of the propellers’ vibrations. She recalls the choppers wobbling as they hovered near her rondavel.
Today, at 98, she crumples her housecoat into a tiny bundle to show how small her infant was, not even 24 hours old.
It was six months since the Ngquza Hill massacre, and a fortnight after the government issued draconian measures to suppress the revolt. Soldiers had returned to round up resistance stragglers who were boycotting tax payments and rabble-rousing against puppet chiefs.
Nozilayi Gwalagwala, 98, is a “living library” of stories and history. The amaMpondo’s care for the environmental is rooted in their customs and cosmology which are passed down through the oral tradition. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.Nozilayi Gwalagwala, 98, has lived off the land for a whole lifetime, growing crops such as maize, beans, and potatoes, and investing in cattle as a way to build wealth. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.
Gwalagwala’s husband was captured that day. He was locked in the back of a truck to ship the prisoners away when it got into trouble at a tricky river crossing and overturned. Many were injured. When news reached Gwalagwala, she feared her husband was dead.
It took a week to track him down, alive but seriously injured in a hospital 55 km (34 mi) away. Much of the journey to find him was on foot, carrying her infant. The baby was later named Gunyazile, because he was born during a time when the “authorities forced the people.”
These were hard times, and her child would forever carry this history in his name.
Today, Gwalagwala tells this story in the presence of her grandson, Lungelo Mtwa, born to the late Gunyazile. Mtwa is 29. After he completed his diploma in tourism management, he returned to the land of his forebears, where he now works as a tour guide.
Tour guide Lungelo Mtwa (29) is taking on the mantle of storyteller from his grandmother Nozilayi Gwalagwala (98), and brings the amaMpondo history to life for the hikers who trek along the coast. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.
Their tale encapsulates the amaMpondo’s wishes. Many welcome development, but want it on their own terms. Light-touch tourism allows them to draw on their culture and the region’s unique biodiversity by offering authentic catered accommodation and guiding services to hiking parties that trek up and down the coast.
“She is a living library,” Mtwa says of his grandmother. “You can hike the Mpondo coast alone, but it is these stories that bring the place to life.”
The amaMponodo’s stories, archived in the oral tradition, carry the customs and cosmology that have ensured the Wild Coast remains wild, then and now, and burns with the spirit of resistance to external powers that wish to profit from their inheritance.
Banner image: Traditional healers use the smoke from the coals of a yellow wood tree (Podocarpus latifolius) to cleanse a cattle herd of problematic spirits and stop the animals from fighting. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.
Today we took yet another ‘combi’, this time from Chinchero, our last stop in Peru, where my kids and I have spent 5 weeks, during our visit to South America.
I feel my heart breaking during the ride. It’s not a bad feeling at all, it’s a feeling of openness, a sensitivity around the heart. I will miss these trips in public transport. These trips in public. It’s been very useful for me to speak Spanish, but I know that the warmth of these intimate connections of people on the go, together, would have melted any language barrier.
A very old man, with a cane, hails the bus. ‘Necesita ayuda’, he needs help, a lady says from behind. One lady bends over to open the door, I bend over to help him up by his other blackened hand, immediately enveloped by the scents of boiled corn cobs and infinite layers of wood smoke. I remember entering a Himba hut. He asks me if we are at ‘la terminal’ a few times and I help to prop him up when he slips on the seat in the abrupt Andean bends in the road. He sips on the ‘chicha morada’ (black corn fermented drink) he brought for the ride in an ancient 20cl Inka Cola bottle, reused time and time again.
‘Gracias Mamita!’… He trusts me like his daughter. When we all get off in Cusco he can’t find his money, and remembers he forgot to remember his other bag. ‘Pago para los cuatro’ I say as my kids slip out from the front row, where they had found two free seats. It seems natural to all. And we drift off in between the busy Saturday market stalls.
I wonder if he remembers where he is going. I wonder who will help him find his way home today. I wonder when he lost his wife. I wonder who will take care of him, when his eyesight and his memory get worse, yet I know there will be care for him, for there is community.
Nowadays, my heart breaks open in a similar way when it feels sorrow and when it feels joy. Sorrow feels like gladness when there exists a non dual sense of greatness that binds them both together. That I have felt strongly here in the Andean mountains and the creases of the Sacred Valley: the greatness of the mountains, revered for their divinity, named Apus. And how men can ‘move mountains’ when led by a vast and sacred sense of purpose. This purpose was driven for the Incas by their trust in their kings and leaders, trust in their elders, trust in the nature gods, and trust in themselves. I quote Robert Bly, whose book ‘Iron John’ I took on travel: ‘The inner King is the one in us who knows what we want to do for the rest of our lives, or the rest of the month, or the rest of the day.’
Each stone in the Incan temples in Peru is a masterpiece. Some of them weigh several tons (one in the Sacsayhuaman -pronounce ‘sexy woman’- weighs 125 tons!) and have been quarried several kilometres away. It is a miracle of human will power that we can admire here today. The Spanish used these works of art as convenient bricks for their monotheist humancentric churches, with the added excuse of ‘extirping idolatry’ from the minds and hearts of the invaded. But they could not move the greater of the stones!
Some of the original Incan pieces have up to 20 different angles that are adjusted without mortar to the next stones, forming a mosaic that not only is creatively diverse in its assembly but also has the perfect structure to resist the earthquakes that the dramatic Pachamama bestows upon this region every few decades. Archaeological prowess is everywhere: in the exact inclination of each temple wall, the drainage of each terrace, the elaboration of door hinges and jambs so that each element collaborates with the others to defy the tricks of gods.
What I have felt all around in the communities that inhabit the Andes is a great sense of belonging, deeper than the Western scattered, individual pursuit of purposefulness. What wisdom the atrocious conquests tried to eradicate is still alive with roots as deep as the mountains are high. Quechuan sounds powerful, indigenous rhythms transpire in the music…, there is no legacy from Spain that has not been blended and sublimed with Incan heritage, more ancient, seeped with spirit, hence more coherent.
And what makes more sense than to revere the nature gods, Inti/Sun the highest of all? And what is more kingly than to present them with the gift of a lifetime of labour? These walls were not built for oneself, for one’s own, they were built for the generations to come, for the Empire, for the Sun itself. Imagine how many lives communed to place each Intipuntu/Sun gate in the exact position where Sun can kiss through it at the exact hour that honours Him?
Yesterday we watched Mama Sonia weave, the inner King in her thumbs knowing which string to move next, which colour to represent her tribe, which shape to represent her land. The tradition of weaving withholds the passing of time in the communities of Chinchero, young women still queuing to learn from the elders the traditional ways, fully aware of the privilege of their culture.
In different ways, this witnessing breaks my heart.
The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.
The size of the networks of solidarity expressing and providing support to Ukrainian refugees is another sign of the capacity of human populations to come together to share their feelings and act upon them. When we open our hearts to the other, individual or collective, human or more-than-human, we are apparently able to reverse years of injustice.
Let us take good note, as Gaia teaches us how to come together. Whilst we fight opinion wars around the scary viruses and the dark oils she produces from her bowels, we are coming together through networking. We are developing the capacity to respond en masse to disaster. We are developing resilience as we slowly come to realise that we need to drop what we are doing to run helter-skelter to the bedside of our sick Mother.
Aaah, here you are, she smiles. I Knew you would come! So you took me for granted, did you?, she cries. As Mother squeezes black oil out of her body, she moans, Can you not see me crying!?
Although our planet shows signs of illness daily with unbalanced ecosystems, biodiversity loss and climate change, she is widely ignored. So, she sent a message for all to receive, from the tyrants of the Kremlin to the humblest Amazonian tribesmen, one that at the core of our ego, one that can threaten our life if we ignore it. This hyper-sophisticated virus carries varying ethos-changing messages for all, whether awoken by fear of suffering, or toppled into passionate love for life, no-one has been left unshaken. Have we heard her plea now? Can we decrypt and put to good use the information we received as individuals, who are also part of the human collective and part and parcel of the Earth? As first world refugees are in the spotlight, do we remember the hunger-stuck refugees who have been huddling in tents in the desert for years? As we breathe through plastic ventilators or clad our beautiful faces with plastic masks, do we remember how our bodies deserve to be fed and cared for, the bodies that our Mother gave us?
Our collective Pain for the World is breaking free now so that we can prioritise and get our response armies trained and organised… Yet, can we feel the urgency in the ecological unravelling that we still perceive as intangible? Surely, yes! If we are able to feel pangs of solidarity in response to these recent crises, even at a distance, our fingers brushing our screens, we must be reviving the muscles of our natural response to danger, we must be noting that it is all connected. And when our fingers brush the leaves, our eyes sweep the horizon, our hearts will open to the realisation that we Knew, we always Knew, that this is why we are here. Close to eight billion individuals have a role to play, with two hundred thousand newcomers daily. We have been called to be a part of the Great Turning.
Gaia Speaking 