In his recent post, “Meditative Musings, Autumn 2009,” Matt remarked that while elephants are one of the largest and strongest animals on earth, they have never made a vaccine or sent a rocket to the moon or conceived of the Hubble Telescope.

One of our readers, Ani Rose Whaleswan, who painted the image of the elephant at the top of this post, comments that while this is true, it is worth remembering that “elephants have communal rituals around birth and death; they communicate across jungles and deserts in a way similar to the way whales do; they have regular family gatherings; they protect their own; and they defend their grieving process.”

Ani concludes that elephants “are amazing animals in many, many ways!  These are things we humans can still stand to learn from, in my opinion.”

Matt responds:

Ani, your observation about the elephants is right on!

I really do not know what is behind the veil when we go to the next reality.  There seem to be many doors and paths and quite a few options.

Very possibly, creatures such as the elephant may be revealed to us as creatures that are far more advanced that we could imagine.

I’ve seen documentaries about elephants going on their migrations to find salt and other food...  They stop and pay homage to the bones of their dead relatives and lovingly turn them over.  It’s like us visiting graves.

Maybe their thought process is much different than ours.  They probably do not have all the maladies and suspicions and idiosyncracies of our species.

Recently I was watching a show about lions, and the experts said that elephants will not tolerate lions under any conditions, and run them off.

That intrigued me from many different standpoints.  But that’s for another meditation...

I think that you’re very intuitive in your thoughts about elephants.

Definitely we don’t know everything.  In fact, we know very little.  And very possibly, we are on the same, although different, pilgramage as every other creature, animal, insect, and crawling, galloping, flying, swimming entity on our planet.

They don’t know it, and possibly we absolutely don’t know it.  It’s all a great unknown.

Every day I retreat to my studio to see if I can make any sense out of anything by interacting with all my materials...  They’re talking to me, I’m talking to them, we’re all talking to the spirit.

It’s almost like what I would envision as the American Indian medicine man trying to communicate with the unseen, the unknown, and the unspoken.

It’s a very exciting, entertaining, safe, threatening, unthreatening, paradoxical place that I love to be in.

Sure beats crawling up inside a gin bottle!

Matt