by
Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.
Introduction
When people live in the middle of nature, it is the most soulful environment and experience. The Savannah wilderness is such an experience that I have personally deeply experienced since I was a child in the 1950s growing up at Chipewa Village in the Eastern Province of Zambia in Southern Africa
. It was such a deep experience that it has been embedded in my soul such that when I stay in the hut in the village today it is one of the most soul-nourishing and spiritual experience. The peak of nature if probably between December at the beginning of the rainy season up to the end of April when the rains end. This is a description of my experiences when I lived in the village in December 2017.
The Mswela Rains
I was in the village in late December 2017. It has been raining for more than 4 weeks and people were tilling the land and planting crops. The grass, trees and all vegetation were deep green with sunny blue sky days with showers and thunder storms in the late afternoons. Thirty yards of clear brown ground surrounds my hut. At edge of the clear surrounding is nature in its complete undisturbed state; sounds, green grass, trees, shrubs, zillions of ants, caterpillars, grasshoppers, birds, frogs, crickets, wild flowers and some critters that may still have no specific names.
Although it had been raining for a few weeks, mswela rains are different. These are light and slow continuous rains that soak the entire earth. As I was sleeping in my hut that night, the mswela rains were falling all night such that seems to have been the signal early the following morning for all critters and creatures to come out. The village clear brown earth was thick with the traffic of nature. The creek nearby was alive with just many sounds. How can nature have so much life?