In this beginning the heaven and the earth are already created. And the earth has formed rocky outcrops where there is life even in the darkness on the face of a once-deep granite plateau, exposed and worn by ages of tropical rainwater flowing across the savanna grasslands into the River Mubundovi. On its meander across the landscape, the river touches lives, and passes farms and villages; in summer gushing after each of the frequent rainstorms, and in winter drying patchily into muddy holes, or simply coming to a standstill as a murky pool.

There is a stillness over the veld; and over the rocky outcrops, the lichen-mottled clumps of grey stones that appear harsh and desolate in the scrubby surrounds. You could amble around any one of them and hardly notice how much life is passing you by, until your eye catches a rainbow lizard twitching its neck as it bakes on a flat rock-chip, or trapdoor spiders darting between the threads of webs spiraling into gaping holes, and rock rabbits peeping up in spaces a darting distance from their burrows. There are scorpions under those rocks, and passages and labyrinths swarming with ants sheltered from the glare of the African sun. And on parching afternoons when the breeze is blowing elsewhere, when all seems at rest, the freshest dassie droppings are reminders that nature can be serene and still, but is never stagnant.

Dassies, innately aggressive and not infrequently violent, scamper on the perpetual search for anything greenish and growing. These hyraxes, or rock rabbits as they are sometimes called, are veld survivors, and will eat plants that are too aromatic for, or toxic to, other creatures. But even they need to avoid the poisoned grain left by the rifle-toting farmers, and their blundering hounds. In turn, their droppings will be the pellets that provide sustenance and shelter for a myriad of insects.

Observe these newly-paired beetles rolling a dung-ball in which the female will lay an egg. But first they must scuttle it to a safe spot: here, next to some others, it is half-buried on the shady side of a stony sheath where, if conditions are aligned, and the bundu permits, it should soon hatch. Is it conceivable that a creature whose life begins pressed up against a small boulder, a mere dung-beetle’s flight away from the river, could make it through countless and contrasting experiences in this confusion of conflicting worlds?

Nearby browses a sprightly pair of grey duikers. They blink and nibble distractedly at a sour-plum shrub that could, in seasons to come, grow taller than the surrounding anthills and offer them cover and protection. The buck nudges and nips, playfully, and horns the nearby bushes, and wets them. Is this the beginning of their courtship? In her delicate struttings, the doe surely knows. As long as there remains the vegetation from which to draw water, this seems a good place for them to loiter, and there will be no need to browse riverwards risking encounters with the dangers that lurk there. There are also, plentiful in the summer veld, fruits and tubers, insects and even small birds or mammals on which to feed. Venturing to the fringes of human settlement, to the lush gardens of a nearby village or farmyard is sometimes safe at night but, for lingering, the open savanna stillness is the place of choice.

The quiet of nature is not ‘silence’, for that is a human construct, like their buildings and carved roads and wild dust-spewing vehicles, and is unlike the daily rising and setting of the sun or the phases of the moon. Or the displays of the Milky Way at night, or the fatiguing heat of summer and the biting chill of winter. There is no right time – there is just savanna stillness and, like a rolling, tumbling dung-ball, time passing – for that is where the peace that gives life begins. For that is where enlightenment begins.

Chapter 1: Egg

Call me Catharsius. That places me in a broad and vague enough order. It calls out to a life of growing and shedding, and moving on. It’s suited to me at any time. At any stage it will classify me. But names are only given when beginnings start to have meaning: humans presume this, don’t they? So am I to remain nameless, naturally? Call me stubborn.

This was all before I became a creature of value and of deserving, and before I began to roll. When I learnt to purposefully move manure, to toil, then, and only after this emergence, was I ‘Rollo’. But time isn’t a dung-ball to be pushed backwards. Discernment invites revisiting the moments of peace that begin life.

I was an egg once. Once. More than – or so my feelers sense – one entire revolution of the savanna ago. Preceding me, the veld had yielded a pair of dung-beetles, whose dust-trails crossed, and they met, and settled their suitability in chemical agreement. Then they toiled, and created an orb of moist excrement, and laboured to lodge it between a rock and a hyrax burrow. It was semi-submerged by their other dung-balls, and formed a kind of nest-pile that was not too wet and not too dry. This was my first of many habitats, a half-buried home, the brood-ball into which I was laid. There were siblings in similar coverings around and above me as I was developing, on the edge, and relatively lower. In the vigilance that nature bestows, my parents kept numerous eyes on all the balls. Seasons of growth have since circulated for me to be in my place, able to look back, and sense the simple wisdom – is that what instinct is? – dung-beetle parents have, to not put all their eggs in one brood-ball, and to know what balls it takes to breed.

That’s because not every ball hits. Squelchy, white insect eggs are nutritious, a perfect mouthful for prowling, marauding ants and swooping, pecking birds. For only a few rotations of the earth under the savanna sun, we remained fixed in the veld, and motionless in manure – or as still as moist growth permits. In the dry and often desolate bundu, dung-beetle zai were sought-after, and looked-after. And I was kept innocently safe, in a protecting brood-ball: parental care extended deep into dung.