When I was young, my father had a little room where he kept his books. This little room could have passed as an office or library. I think it was his informal way of getting the formal education he hadn’t received.
The space was sacred to him. It was usually off-limits for us kids, except for me. Not that he allowed me in, but I was a curious kid and would enter his sacred room and sit on his sacred chair and read whatever books intrigued my young and naive mind. There were famous biographies and the writings of famous dead people. These people continue to live through their texts. Strange, isn’t it? Years after writers go six feet below, death cannot stop them from living. Yes, they continue to live in people’s minds and hearts tax- and rent-free.
The biographies were my favorite. One was about David Livingstone, whose heart is buried under a tree in Africa. Another was about Hudson Taylor, the man who won a nation by prayer. Love, sacrifice, unity: my father’s little room was full of wonder, living words that could enflame even the deadest of souls.
Often I would stroll into the bush behind our home. The forest has some huge trees: acacia, iroko, neem, ayin, palm and many others. I don’t know all the names, but I enjoyed jumping and pulling at the branches, their green leaves (or brown, depending on the season) dropping like flakes.
Peculiar terrains, crisscrossing rivers and different kinds of animals made up that part of the wild. The landscapes were formed by nature over time or by wild tragedies that could have passed as sacred, haunting or both, depending on one’s point of view. Lightning struck one enormous palm tree, and it burned to death, the grass around it suffering the same fate. Then water washed the sand off the roots, exposing the homes of some dangerous creatures — bush foxes, snakes, maybe even ghosts, and many other things I wouldn’t want to meet.
I’d see a special kind of insect, a dung beetle which seemed eternally to roll dung around like a precious jewel. Its dedication to its dung-duty was amazing, even inspiring. Sometimes the beetle rolled its dung so close to my boots that I would open my stance to let it to pass unharmed. I knew that somehow this task was sacred to this beetle — rolling dungs around unperturbed.
Other times I would hear a songbird sing an angelic tune for several minutes before taking a break, only to start again. I loved that. I might be lucky enough to hear one songbird — or a whole church of them. They do this every day, so it must be sacred to them, too. Maybe the repetition of these unpaid bardic services they offer to the trees, grass and animals (and sometimes me) does for their fluffy souls what gravity does for the body.
A blue Mother Mary doll my elder sister gave me when I was about 8 was my earliest personal encounter with such reverence. I cherished that doll so much, which is supposed to be strange — a boy loving a doll. Yet it wasn’t the doll, but rather my sweet, only sister that aroused my reverence. I carried that doll around like my second shadow. It wasn’t just sacred to me; it was almost my first love. But then a stray dog chewed its blue head off, and the rest of its plastic body was later crushed by a careless motorist.
Reading inside my father’s library and walking in the wild, I discovered that sacredness may be inarguable, soul-deep, personal. However, outside one’s own soul, what is deemed sacred becomes subject to perception. And that is why what is ordinary — dung or junk — to one person can be a relic to another. As temples are to saints, so is dirt to worms: sacred.
Sometimes I dared to stroll the wild at night to observe nocturnal beings as they emerged from their secret havens. The crickets, oh the crickets, they never failed to deliver their solemn night songs. But I hated it whenever the bush babies would join them, tearing the soft fabric of the night with their razor voices. Bush babies should know that not all voices are good for singing. Especially theirs.
I enjoyed many nighttime sights. Some female frogs carry their male counterparts on their backs during mating season, and it must be so sacred to them to bear that weight. Crabs at the openings of their holes tried to get their cut-up meals through their cartilaginous mouths. I would see mother crabs carrying their babies inside their chest flaps. These moments of intimacy and vulnerability might be sacred to these creatures of the night — but not to pythons or other predators that are just looking for their dinner or breakfast, or whatever they call their meals in the animal kingdom.
Speaking of predators, the night I came face to face with a black cobra as big as my forearm was the night I officially retired from these nocturnal explorations. My spirit left my body and ran for safety. Within seconds, the snake slithered away, its scales like black shoe polish, but in my mind it took forever for the cobra to leave. Then my runaway spirit returned, panting like someone who had circled the planet in five seconds. I turned around and walked home, shivering like a fowl caught in a snowstorm.
For the record, I don’t fear snakes. I have deep respect for them. Especially the big snakes, the kind of respect that makes you turn away when you see one. We humans are not sacred to wild beasts. And dying from a snake bite is not sacred to me, either. Goodbye, night strolling.
A Yoruba hunter once sold a huge python to my father. Being an Igbo man, my father explained how pythons are sacred in some parts of Igboland. Funeral services are held when one is killed. However, on Yoruba land, the python is meat. Sweet meat at that. Nothing is revered by all people with the same conviction. Not even God — ask the atheist.
Anything may have a measure of sacredness attached to it. The dung, the dirt, the devil you abhor with all fierceness is a subject of devotion to another person or group. Even now, many things are losing relevance and popularity, like true love, truth, family, friendship, generosity, even life. But life is still sacred to me, and hopefully it remains so for some others around the world. No matter how many times life and these other values are plunged into the trough of apathy, I will fish them out, clean them and line them up in my own secret room, somewhere in my heart. And every morning I will say: O sacred love, O sacred truth.
I have learned the sacredness of prayers. And I wish countries would win their wars with prayers rather than with tanks and missiles.
Even now, I collect books like a little boy gathering seashells. Harvesting wonders from the printed page and transplanting them into the watered furrows of my mind: the voices of writers who dared to share the little light they had with this dark world. Death cannot take these people away from me. Sacred!
No matter how hard I try to separate my sacred companions (weird trees, dung beetles, songbirds, mother crabs and mating frogs) from the unsacred ones (the ugly noises bush babies make, that kiwi black Cobra I fear respect, the ghosts I never encountered), I have seen how these things cohabitate, how each validates the other. Without darkness, light is useless. And it is in times of great evil that the fiercest and purest good is born. Yes, love, truth, goodness: Sacred! Sacred! Sacred!
Hope Joseph is an essayist and poet from Nigeria who has written for The Christian Science Monitor, Augur, Stormbird, A Long House and other publications. He is a joint winner of the SEVHAGE/Agema Founder’s Prize for Creative Fiction.