ONE MINUTE MUSE
Songlines

"Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

Rumi

 

The sun rises over the Kalahari, glowing red through the morning mist.  This is the signal for the locals to get going before the heat of the day.  A small woman called XÕaga emerges from a brush shelter and packs her hide bag with digging tools.  She is keenly observed by dozens of tiny meerkats, standing stiffly on top of their burrows, warming their muscles for a long foraging expedition.  In the Kalahari Desert everyone has to dig for breakfast.

 

XÕagaÕs family assembles and they set off at a steady pace.  ÒLetÕs head towards !U,Ó she calls and they all know exactly where to go.  For you or me, !U might be the name of a street or cafe.  For XÕaga it is the name of one particular tree.  Her language has no generic word for ÔtreeÕ because each individual tree matters.  So does every waterhole, every life giving berry and tuber.

 

These are the !Xun San, one of the indigenous peoples of southern Africa whose story stretches back at least 100,000 years.  Their language evolved with their nomadic lifestyle.  It enabled them to map the wide Kalahari veld with a grid of landmarks that provided context and location.  They could gather and hunt with extreme precision.  Scientists have recently made an extraordinary discovery Ð the brain itself has a similar tracking system.  Instead of rocks and trees we have place-tracking neurons called Ôgrid cellsÕ that project a lattice of equilateral triangles - geometrically regular and perfect.  Thousands of these projections fire whenever we move, constantly updating our cognitive map according to our physical position in space.

 

And so it seems that ancient history and modern science have come together in a surprising way.  For countless generations, XÕaga and her forebears attached stories and myths to their environment, reinforcing their memory of the terrain and creating songlines, the very basis of their identity.  Now we know that each one of us is doing the same thing in our seemingly modern lives.

 

Today, as you set off for your own waterhole, remember XÕaga and her !U tree, for every step you take is being mapped deep in your brain.  You are making your own songlines and they are the evolving story of your life.

 

What songlines are you creating?

 

Sources and inspiration:

THE ILLUMINATED RUMI, Coleman Barks & Michael Green, Broadway Books 1997

SOUTH AFRICA SAN INSTITUTE (SASI) Annual Review 2001/2002

LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, Wade Davis, National Geographic Society, 2001

WADE DAVIS , NGS Explorer-in-Residence

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND, ÔThe Matrix in Your HeadÕ, J Knierim & D Redish, July 2007

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN BLOG : Grid Cells: Putting Rats In Their Places And (Maybe) Meaning In Life, Jan 23 2007

© 2008 Nuala Woodham.  All rights reserved.  One Minute Museª published quarterly.
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