Part 2_Episode 2_Simplicity is abundance


Story Hunter, part two, episode two. Simplicity is abundance. As you get older, you get busier, life inevitably gets more complicated. In the lead up to the trip between me, James and Alex, we had crazy busy schedules. We ended up doing most of our planning via WhatsApp messages. In fact, if we had one conversation, that would have been a lot. And you could say that there was a hubris to this. But also, the three of us had spent so much time in the bush, we knew we didn't need much, and we knew we could put it together pretty quickly. In fact, as is often the truth, sometimes all the gear and the planning can get in the way of the experience. That was not going to be a problem on this trip. Besides, I didn't want too many things between me in the wilderness. Alex pulled on his network to somehow wrangle us a 4X4 vehicle. The outpost town of Mount is essentially a supply town on the edge of the Okavango Delta. There we would be able to grab most of what we needed - food, camping gear. The days would be profoundly hot, the nights cold water would be an absolute priority. We had taken the time to acquire a satellite phone, knowing that if it actually came down to us using it, it was safe to say that things had gone extremely belly up. There are parts of the Central Kalahari, where if you break down, no one will come for you. There are roads in central Botswana that no one traverses for weeks at a time. That's where we're going. I recently heard a story of a man whose vehicle broke down on the bone dry Mahadi Hadi pans. In desperation for water, he left the vehicle. The Botswana Defence Force was sent to find him. For a full day they tracked him in circles before realising they're in fact, tracking an ostrich. The Bushmen were then called and the man was found on the brink of death. 


Alex and I had been to the Kalahari once before. I remember sleeping in red sand dunes, like Bedouins. We buried our water on that trip deep in the cool recesses of the dunes where it could be kept cool against the desert heat. We had fallen into the rhythm of the desert, operating through the early mornings, and trying to rest during the heat of the day. I have a single memory from the trip. I had been awake from 3am, keeping watch around a small fire. Above me the stars blaze ferociously as they can only in the desert. I remember feeling the space of the wilderness around me as if a vastness was entering my body. And for a moment I remember being appropriately humbled simply by the scope of space around me. At sunrise while the other slept in the sand around the fire, the first light crept into the dunes. As Gemsbok came painted and fierce at a gallop down the valley between the reds and as he ran parallel to me, a wind touched my back, blowing my scent into his fierce nostrils. The animal stopped suddenly throwing sand and then turned to look at me. And in that moment, and his painted face and straight horns, I saw a warrior. I projected some deep male archetype onto the beast and for years in my 20s, that single image from that morning nourished a part of my spirit, the warrior. One drink like that at the well of wildness will make you a lifelong devotee. When I felt alone, or afraid or weak, the fierce face of that animal would appear in my memory.


An experience like that will make your tracker. Always returning to nature to slake your wild thirst.
In the weeks leading up to the trip, I started reading about the Bushman people. And there were some key themes in the reading that grabbed my mind as they were in such contrast to modern life. I was pleased to be a bit clued into this. Richard Katz writes in his book boiling energy energy, for Bushman people, food surpluses are not prominent, as the environment itself acts as a storehouse. When I read that as we thought about preparing and getting supplies for the trip, I could feel the deep psychological abundance in the idea that your environment was your storehouse. What a way to live. No need for hoarding. These people knew they would be provided for even by the incredibly harsh desert. Your environment is your storehouse. 


Another amazing thing is that sharing is a huge part of Bushman culture. Family groups living in partially nomadic clans around water points, there is a reciprocal access to water and gathering areas, there is little to no personal property. I was interested to see if these traditional ways were still being held, or if it had all been lost. 


Another thing I had read about which fascinated me about the Bushman people, was many accounts refer, even inside of their hunter, gatherer lifestyle, to a tremendous focus on free time. Lots of time is spent chatting, socialising and resting. Essentially, hanging out is a huge part of Bushman life. In my life and work as a coach, guide and facilitator, I've seen a lot of how modern life structures the psyche. People will think of themselves as being orientated a certain way. without realising that the structure of a consumerist culture will shape and programme the ego structure. You will think you are a certain way instead of seeing the culture makes you that way. Scarcity is built into a consumerist culture. And with that, we somehow lose reciprocity and sharing, or certainly it's suppressed. Comparison is programmed into modern culture. Never been able to resist is programmed into modern culture. And if you sit in enough coaching sessions or ceremonial spaces, you will see these core programmes of the culture in everyone's mind. I'm not good enough. I won't have enough. I'm not working hard enough. If they have more, I have less. There isn't enough. I'm not where I should be. They're ahead and I'm behind.




I wanted to know what it would feel like to be with people who still felt their land was the storehouse. And was this even still the case? There was so much I wanted to learn in the desert. My own life has been getting busier and more complex as my career has grown. The desert will call for a beautiful simplicity. And I always know when I'm in an important experience because the experience itself starts to constellate new thought processes. I start to daydream about how to ignite the collective psychological abundance in our culture. What can we do to instill a sense of abundance in people? What mechanism could unlock a psychological abundance in modern people? What mechanism could unlock a psychological abundance in modern people want out of the box way to instantly create more abundance is to connect people with simplicity, have more by wanting less. I want to return to that simplicity while I'm in the desert. The happiest people I've met in modern life rich or poor, have always simplified. And I don't want to idolise anything. 


I certainly did not know what we would find in the desert. But I was excited about simplicity. I hoped with the Bushman people, I could touch an older way of life that might teach me how to live in this one. And I was glad to be with Alex and James, knowing we didn't need much, and actually we didn't want much. I wanted the wild to strip us down, to strip me down. Take us back to the simplicity we lived in for 1000s of years. I wanted to go back to a time when nature was our storehouse when we knew how to share and simply be