The Chimpanzee and The Papaya
The following is a short story from a book that was of great significance to me, many moons ago.
In “The Book of Ceremonies: A Native Way of Honoring and Living the Sacred”, Gabriel Horn writes about a moment in time, involving a Chimpanzee and a Papaya.
This tale speaks to the heart of the work that we offer. Whether it’s through ceremony, ritual, sacred meditation, calling for a vision, the expansion of consciousness in healthy and wholesome ways; these are pathways that offer us opportunities to become more intimate with our souls journey; our hearts calling; whatever it is that touches us with so much gravitas that we feel to offer something back in gratitude.
Something so meaningful and treasured that we might ask ourselves…
In what ways is my life a gift to creation? What am I offering my life up to - to be in service to something greater?
The big questions in life.
May this story stir something precious within; however profound or subtle…
There is a remarkable scene in the book Our Kinship with the Animals.
Gary Kowalski, a Unitarian minister and animal rights advocate, describes the observations of a zoologist who was caught early one evening by the splendour of an incredible sunset in an African rainforest.
While he was appreciating the moment, he saw a lone chimpanzee come into the scene, cradling a papaya close to his body. The chimp paused at an opening between the trees that provided an especially impressive view.
“For a full fifteen minutes, the animal remained spellbound by the spectacle of the changing colours of the dusk and watched them without moving.”
Then something wonderful happened, something that could help civilised humans become more aware of their own primal source and that of other life forms as well. The chimp, after his motionless observance of the setting sun, gently placed his papaya on the ground where he stood and left it there, heading back into the thicket, as silent as the evening breeze.
A ceremony?
Perhaps.
The significance of this and similar incidents among animals has been debated for ages among scientists and theologians. They argue whether or not these are truly occurrences in Time and Space when nonhuman life forms connect with conscious awareness to something sacred.
Some say that the magic of the moment affected the chimp so deeply that he wandered off, forgetting the papaya. Other say the chimps reaction must have been completely unrelated to the sunset and that he simply lost interest in the papaya and left it on the ground where he had been standing.
But some of us feel that in some way the chimp left the papaya as an offering, a gift to the beauty of the place and to the Mystery of it all. Perhaps he even brought the treasured papaya there with that intention.
Perhaps he truly was honouring and expressing his gratitude for the sacred, and perhaps this is a primal element of our own nature, deeply rooted in our animal DNA. It does appear that the chimp, whether conscious of it or not, was doing something that our elders insist upon:
We must never take from the world without expressing our gratitude, and without giving something back.
Maybe, the seed of this kind of acknowledgement is something that was nourished by the knowledge we acquired from our elder and wiser relatives, the animals, a very long time ago.
But maybe such a seed was simply planted by the Great Mystery in the beginning to provide us with our Original Instruction and Purpose within the Wheel of Life itself.
I don’t believe humankind can ever completely surrender our ways of acknowledging and honouring this awareness. If we did, we would become so civilised that we would no longer live with a conscious reverence and respect for our relationship to the greater web of life outside ourselves.
We would no longer allow the magic in the Mystery to stir our imaginations and creativity. We would no longer feel our connectedness to life, or our sense of wonder and appreciation for life. We would no longer be challenged to grow further as spiritual beings in these physical forms.
If we surrender our ways of acknowledging and honouring the sacred, then how would we come closer to the understandings and insights that enable us to grow? How would we be able to help ourselves heal and become whole after being hurt and broken?
And if we surrender our ways of acknowledging and honouring the sacred, then what would be the Purpose of our existence? What would be the Purpose for living?
Something sacred and mysterious connects us all, human and nonhuman, corporeal and incorporeal beings alike, and these moments of recognition occur among a great diversity of life forms in Time and Space…
Moments when that sacred union, that sense of ineffable Oneness, is pronounced and appreciated and realized.
It is natural, in these moments, to offer something in gratitude.
