“It is the nature of ebony, people say, as it grows wild in the forest or bush, to hear signals about what is going on in the human world, and it is these secrets which are revealed in consultation. The ebony knows the grumblings and suffering of people… (People) offer the ebony their problems, attend its signal in silence, and seek their salvation through it. The ebony can aid the people because it has listened to their voices.”
The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion, and Power among the Uduk of Sudan.
-Wendy James
Belief in the extraordinary, especially in their healing abilities, is inherent to human nature. The reason for such predisposition of the human mind could be many but at its roots, I suspect, the reliance on supernatural is an acknowledgement of and reconciliation with our limited self-healing abilities. Whatever the reason, such conceptualization reveals a marvelous feature of our brain… its ability to sew together unrelated concepts and ideas into a coherent strong narrative which is easy to believe. Uduk speaking Sudanese, over centuries, have believed that ebony trees (Dalbergia melanoxylon) can recall conversations held in their vicinity. This memory can be ‘retrieved’ by burning the black core of a branch and interpreting ashes and smudges formed when the burned stick is dipped in water. So strong is their belief that ailing Sudanese prefer interpretations of ebony diviner over modern medicine. While rational scientific thinking will strongly disapprove of the entire exercise, yet, thousands of Uduk-speakers believe in the listening ebony. Ask them and they will swamp you with their ‘rational’ about how a tree can indeed listen, remember, recall and heal.
The human psyche is deeply encoded to juxtapose human elements (hearing, memory) and the supernatural (to heal) together and assign it to nonhuman everyday objects to ‘make it’ believable. It is perhaps our latent innocence from ages ago that remains subconsciously active today and sculpts these seamless hard-to-dismiss narratives of supernatural healers. Healing, I admit, is an innocent process and there is no reason why a tree cannot heal, whether it can listen or not. Perhaps, counterintuitively, trees can listen and speak too?
On a recent nature walk with my two and half year old son on a somewhat melancholic morning, I suggested that he should try and talk to trees, for they listen very patiently. Amazed at my suggestion, he stared for few seconds at the big tree we stood under and then said calmly, “Daddy, listen to tree. Do you listen to tree?” These were his exact words.
Dismissing his comment would have been easy, but I could not. Perhaps, like the Uduk-speakers of a faraway continent, his unburdened mind has retained the innocence to hear whispers and hushes of trees. Perhaps, in trying to understand myself at an exaggerated level, I have exhausted my virtuousness and the sermons of trees and every other healer around me has become inaudible.
I should listen to my son. I should listen to the tree, the whispering tree.
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