Elephant
The beasts in my head, a parable
Occasionally, I get personal on Subtle Sparks — my jungle writing. This is such an occasion. I usually keep these for paid subscribers, but I wanted to share this one with you all. Perhaps it contains something useful.
Quirky ‘biology meets culture and/or technology’ essays will resume shortly.
In the jungle of my brain, there lives an elephant.
Not a cute little forest elephant. No, this is a primordial beast. A giant with fire in its eyes and blood-crusted tusks that span lifetimes. This particular elephant is not a herbivore either; it’s an anivore that feeds on thoughts and feelings. It grows bolder when it can feast on silence, self-doubt, and helplessness.
When it grows bold enough, this particular elephant stomps through the jungle to carve straight paths in a world made of curves. Everything breaks. The beast tramples and the jungle shudders. Other animals skitter away, thoughts take to the skies in a cacophonous, aimless roar, and trees that took ages to grow are turned to soggy, useless kindle.
Here is what I learned: Like all elephants, this one is clever and gifted with a good memory. It remembers my failures and trumpets them at me until my eardrums rupture, cleverly neglecting to mention the lessons those failures taught me.
Once upon a time, Winston Churchill borrowed a metaphor from the ancient Roman poet Horace. Some people, the poet and the prime minister said, are followed by a black dog that only they can see. My dog happens to be an elephant. Only, the elephant is not an elephant. Not really. It is not a dog either. It is a disposition. It is work and wealth and gift and curse. It is depth and feeling, sense and sensation. It is the abyss and the starry sky. I do not fully subscribe to the tortured genius idea (which would leave me tortured because I lack the genius bit and that just sounds like no fun), but I have learned from the elephant.
In the Japanese art kintsugi, broken pottery is glued back together with golden lacquer covering the cracks. In rare moments, I sparkle. All it took was some cracks.
Here is what I learned: It is too easy to tumble into clichés. You know the ones. No light without dark, it’s darkest before dawn, rain encourages growth, growth requires discomfort, and so on. Clichés for clicks. The elephant eats such vagaries of hope. The beast in my brain is not good or bad. It simply is. Nietzsche knew that, sometimes, you need to force the abyss to stare into you. Along the same tectonic plates, Italian writer Cesare Pavese once thought of a quote that got stuck in my elephant-containing brain.
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out, and descend into it.
I don’t need to hurt the elephant. I don’t need to escape the elephant. I need to understand the elephant. Good thing I’m a biologist.
Here is what I learned: Jungles are resilient. What the elephant tramples will grow anew. Different, perhaps, but bright and boisterous nonetheless. Unintentionally, the elephant tills the soil and fertilizes the next generation of trees and shrubs and flowers. If I’d focus only on the elephant I would miss all the beauty in the jungle, beauty that has never left. I would not see the lady of the night orchid bloom in the shadows of the jungle’s mangrove edge. I would not see inconspicuous vines flexibly mimic other plants to defy what we thought the limits of plant intelligence were. I would not see peacock spiders give the finest human dancers a run for their money.
Elephant? Here be jaguars and ocelots, siamangs and orangutans, poison frogs and macaws and boas and giant trees and fungal networks that dwarf the elephant. Here be orchids, gentle and frail as a whisper in a hurricane, and here be unstoppable ant armies that figured out the laws of combat before humanity picked up its first rock.
I am not the elephant and the elephant does not define me. I am the jungle and all of its creatures, including, yes, the elephant, but also much more.
The elephant charges only to stop at the very last moment. Its fiery eyes look down at me and its hot, cloying breath fills my lungs.
“Hello, my friend,” I say, weary but defiant.
The beast sits down, huffing like a grumpy old man.
Here is what I learned: The elephant too just wants to be loved.
I hug its giant, bristly trunk.
“Good boy.”
Oh, hell yes. This. This is it. This is what most people miss—the beast isn’t the villain. The beast is you. Not some separate entity, not some foreign invader to be fought off, but a part of the same ecosystem that makes you you. And yet, how many people spend their lives pretending the jungle should be neat, orderly, devoid of creatures with teeth? They pave over the roots, sterilize the soil, pretend that what lurks in the underbrush isn’t there. But you? You looked the beast in the eye. You named it. You fed it understanding instead of fear. And that, my friend, is how the whole damn jungle thrives.
See, people have been sold this lie that healing is about elimination. That the bad parts—the rage, the grief, the failures, the anxieties—need to be excised. That if we just discipline ourselves enough, we can tame the wilds, trim the overgrowth, make ourselves palatable and presentable. But real growth? Real understanding? That comes from sitting down with your goddamn elephant and offering it love. Not turning it into a house pet. Not chaining it up in the basement where it kicks and screams in the dark. But acknowledging that it is here, that it always was here, and that maybe—just maybe—it’s been trying to tell you something all along.
And here’s the kicker—the jungle doesn’t just bounce back; it evolves. That trampled earth? That’s the foundation for the next version of you. The next iteration, the one that has lived, lost, learned. Those golden seams, those cracks filled with light? They aren’t flaws. They’re maps. They show you where the fire passed through, where the elephant has been, where you’ve been reforged.
So, keep speaking to the beast. Keep sitting with it. Keep listening to what it has to say, because anyone who has ever built anything worth a damn—anyone who has ever known the weight of being—has had to walk through the jungle and shake hands with the things they once feared. And what do they find? Not ruin. Not emptiness.
But life.
And the great, roaring beauty of becoming.
What a wonderful, poetic metaphor and how wise of you not to want to kill or cage the elephant! It's hard though, I know how hard it is to 'look it in the eyes', but also it's the essence of life.
I loved the part where you say if you focus too much on the elephant, you miss the beauty of the jungle! 💚