Power, Patience, Solitariness: A Lesson

Photograph: Mark P, sometime in the early 1990s, MalaMala Game Reserve, South Africa.

I was all poised to write about tarot and AI – an article that is still very much in the works – when I was somewhat hijacked by an idea:

“I’ve written an article about elephants. So, given I’m a half-South African girlie, why don’t I go all-in and write an article about every animal in the Big Five?”

Which requires a bit of an explanation for those of you unfamiliar with what the Big Five is.

Traditionally, the Big Five referred to the five most dangerous animals in the bushveld to hunt on foot: buffalo, elephant, leopard, lion, rhino. (That’s alphabetical order, but in reality, that’s probably about the order of danger too.)

This was at a time when hunting was the only thing that mattered: enacted by the men who colonised, tamed – often slaughtered to near-extinction, and sometimes preserved – southern Africa when life was hard, polarised, and short-lived. However, as safaris shifted from dead animals, and at times dead people resulting from dead animals, into burgeoning tourism revenue in the late Twentieth Century, the Big Five retained its cachet – but this time as the five species people most wanted to photograph. Any safari outfit operating out of Africa will experience a very regular question from its Nikon- and Canon-toting clientele:

“Are we going to see the Big Five today?”

All of these five animals are amazing. (Honestly: all animals are amazing, period.) For me, however, the most exciting, the most numinous, of all of them is the leopard. I have been incredibly lucky to see leopards in the wild many times. They are magnetic subjects – strikingly photogenic. The image accompanying this article was taken by my brother many years ago, which he gave to me, framed, as a birthday present. It is still there, on top of a shelf unit in my bedroom. The leopard endureth. Why? Because the leopard embodies the qualities of power, patience, and solitariness that inspire me.

Power: not brute strength (which I do not have as a person of limited stature), but a kind of force that powers through. There’s a focus to it that defies gravity. If you’ve seen a leopard drag a full-grown impala up a tree, you’ll know how powerful that directed force can be. It is uncompromising.

Patience: as a solitary animal, a leopard cannot rely on hunting partners like lions or wild dogs, so it stalks by stealth – much of it in the art of waiting. If it strikes too early or too late, it doesn’t eat. If it strikes too noisily, other predators will come and steal its food. If it strikes at all clumsily, one kick of an antelope hoof, one prod of a small buck horn, and it may sustain a wound that, while insignificant at first, can have a severe impact on its ability to feed itself.

Solitariness: leopards are not comfortable bed-fellows with other leopards. Yes, they’ll come together to mate, and if you’ve ever seen that, you’ll experience the word ambivalence in a whole new light. Mating is both imperative and painful for a female leopard. She lures the male in with swishes of her tail and weaving in front of him that demonstrates her readiness; and then, at the moment of copulation, she will turn around with a curdling yowl, and bite him as he bites her, swatting him away while also bidding him back. I found it fascinating but stressful to watch. And when a male leopard’s mating work is finally over after a few days, he’s off again into his own adjacent territory until the next female in oestrus makes her scent known to him.

For our, now-pregnant, leopardess, she hunts until the point of birth, then retreats for maybe a few days to give birth, leaving her cub/s behind to hunt again when she needs food. She will move her cubs around as she moves around. She will teach them play-hunting tactics when they are a bit older; she will show them how to hunt when they are older still; and, when they are old enough, she will leave them to hunt for themselves. This is not a human untangling of adult and child: once again, it is fraught with ambivalence, the young leopard in a kind of limbo where they look like they belong with her, yet she looks like she’d prefer to be alone. And soon after that, they part ways. To us humans, that can feel like very tough love.

When I started writing this, I’d wondered what tarot had to do with leopards and why it was that I felt compelled to keep going, but now I see.

Reading tarot for clients is, for me at least, an exercise in ambivalence. I doubt myself. Every single time. I don’t believe it works. Every single time. A reading for me is creatively painful; takes more focus than I bargain for; and, while I engage with the cards in a far more familiar and give-and-take way than mating leopards, I do wonder about the nature of the connection and what it’s all about. It is solitary work - sometimes infuriating work, more frequently transcendent work. It is just me, and what coalesces in front of me. And when I see what coalesces – whether it’s one card, two, or more – the ambivalence never leaves me. I feel a profound sense of responsibility … for something that doesn’t feel like it has much to do with me and yet which is also very much a part of me. In truth, though, it is its own thing. The responsibility lies in letting it be its own thing while I am simultaneously there to bring it to fruition. And then I let it go. It is not mine anymore.

It goes without saying that I’d rather be a tarot reader than a leopard. There are poetic parallels, but it is merely metaphorical and my experience is not dangerous nor dramatic. But we would be nowhere without metaphors, and mine, here, is the leopard. Just this morning, as I was making my bed, the photograph of the leopard on my shelf unit fell over for the first time since I put it there. A reminder that I needed to finish what I started, and to get on with it. I had started this article nearly a week ago, and then meandered off on to other things. Not very Panthera pardus. Time to be a leopard - and a leopard may bide its time, but it never wastes it.