The Ancient Pull: Reflections from the Great Migration

Summer - Week 32 - On Herds and Ancient Rhythms

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

Sand and dust cling to the wheels of our landing gear as we descend into the Serengeti, and already something ancient stirs. A recognition deeper than memory. Below, the earth stretches in tawny waves beneath umbrella acacia trees that have witnessed this same drama for millennia. We have come to observe the great migration, but the moment our feet touch this ground, I feel my own restlessness awakening, as if something dormant in my chest suddenly remembers how to beat in rhythm with the wind and open sky.

Thousands upon thousands are moving as one organism across these endless plains. Wildebeest surge forward in waves of dusty determination, their grunts and calls creating a symphony of survival that has played unchanged for two million years. Beside them, a dazzle of zebra flow like living rivers of black and white, their stripes blurring into patterns that speak a language older than words. They move as water moves, as seasons turn, as the earth remembers itself spinning.

At the Mara River, we witness the moment where instinct meets terror. The waters run swift and brown, demanding their timeless price from all who would cross. A wildebeest approaches the bank, stops, retreats, approaches again. Behind him, thousands wait. The mathematics of survival play out in real time: the cost of crossing versus the cost of staying, the weight of the future pressing against the fear of the present. Watching them emerge, mud-streaked and trembling, I feel something crack open in my chest. This is prayer made flesh, devotion written in movement. How many generations have made this crossing? How many more will we allow?

When they finally leap, it is with the faith of those who have no choice but to believe. Bodies hit water, some swept away, others scrambling up muddy banks on legs that shake with exhaustion and relief. Tawny eagles circle overhead, patient as death itself. This is life distilled to its essence: movement, risk, survival, loss. I am witnessing something sacred, something that exists only because we have not yet found a way to fence it, pave it, or price it. The weight of that privilege sits heavy in my throat.

But it was the night the zebras came through our camp that the boundary between watching and belonging dissolved entirely. In the darkness, hoofbeats approached like distant thunder, growing closer until our tent was surrounded by breathing, moving forms in the tall grass. No fear, only a quiet acknowledgment, as if they recognized us as fellow travelers. For those moments, we existed within their ancient procession, temporary members of a congregation we had never thought to join.

The elephants chose a different evening for their visitation. Gentle giants moving through another camp with the deliberate care of those who carry the wisdom of ages. Their quiet trumpeting spoke of conversations we could not understand, matriarchal knowledge passed down through generations like heirlooms of survival. In those moments, I understand what we have caged ourselves away from - this belonging, this fluid boundary between self and wild world. They move with a freedom so complete it makes our human freedoms seem like small consolations.

In the Ngorongoro Crater, I discover the strange mathematics of preservation. Here, steep walls rise like the rim of a broken world, creating not a prison but a sanctuary. Within this ancient caldera, life concentrates and thrives - the elephants move here in family processions toward water holes, their calls echoing off crater walls that have held these conversations for three million years. Lions rest in the golden grasslands, their presence a reminder that even apex predators find peace within these protective boundaries.

The crater holds them all: hyenas prowling the edges of light and shadow, their calls rising like questions no human tongue can answer; bustard birds stepping through grass with the deliberate grace of ceremony; baobab trees standing sentinel with their massive trunks storing not just water but the accumulated wisdom of two thousand seasons. These trees of life have watched countless migrations flow in and out of this protected bowl, witnessed countless generations of humans learning and forgetting the same essential truths.

So the walls that contain also preserve. In our world above, we build walls to shut things, people, the wild out; here, the earth itself has built walls to shelter. Beyond the crater rim, the Maasai people plough with oxen as their ancestors did three millennia ago, their fields stretching across the highlands that border this sanctuary. They understand something we have lost - that true belonging doesn't require possession. They farm the edges of paradise, moving across their ancestral lands following rhythms older than our notion that home must be a fixed point on a map. They know what we have forgotten: that sometimes the deepest freedom comes not from endless wandering, but from honoring the boundaries that hold what is sacred.

From our lodge on our last Serengeti morning, we heard the clacking of ibis over breaking dawn, their voices cutting through lake mist like announcements of each new day's possibilities. The mud swallows who had built their nest under the eaves of our room, were busy with their own small migration between earth and air, following patterns we had lost the ability to read. Even these smallest movements seemed to whisper the same truth the Maasai knew: that home is not confinement but rhythm, not location but relationship to the larger dance.

Now, we have returned to Colorado and enclosed within four walls, I feel the strangeness of a different kind of confinement. Yes, I can see the mountains from my windows, follow ridgelines into distance, but something else has shortened. Not what I can see but how deeply I can feel part of it all. Here, life comes layered with complications: schedules and obligations, the endless buzz of connectivity, choices that multiply rather than clarify. The contrast is jarring - there, walls preserved wildness; here, they seem to contain only our forgetting. How much do our homes restrict our dreams simply by how complicated we've made life?

Yet even here, ancient patterns persist. As Fall approaches the Hummingbirds are preparing for journeys that will carry them thousands of miles on wings that seem too fragile for such ambition. Green finches gather, starlings murmur in formation, swallows test the air for signals I cannot interpret. They know when to move and when to stay, when to hold fast and when to let go. They carry within them the same inner compass that guides the herds across the Mara.

I realize now that I too have been moving toward new ground for a long time, following currents I barely understood. The migration was not just something I witnessed, it was something that witnessed me; held up a mirror to my own restless searching. So now after three years, perhaps the question is not where else to look, but when to stop looking? When do we cease our endless movement and recognize that we have already arrived where we needed to be?

The baobab trees offer one answer: sometimes home is not a place but a deepening, not an arrival but the growing recognition of what we have always carried within us. The migration continues out there on the endless plains, and here within the cage of ribs that holds our wandering hearts. But for me, I can finally stop the restless searching. I can breathe again. I no longer need to seek what I have become.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane