Weeping Camel
Fall, 2005
Last night my husband and I watched the National Geographic film, “The Story of the Weeping Camel.” Set in the stark landscape of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, brutal windstorms contrast with the gentleness of the people. Isolated in a gray world, these people dress themselves in rich fabrics, blanket their camels with pads of intricate handiwork, and fill their round dwellings with colorful wall hangings, beautiful floor coverings and family warmth. They also listen to the unseen cadences of nature, of life, of emotion.
The film covers the tribe’s camel-calving season. The last camel to go into labor is having her first baby. The birth is difficult, and she needs help. A young mother coaches the men as they deliver the colt, instructing them to work with the rhythm of the camel’s contractions. Sitting there with bated breath, I witness the traumatic miracle of birth. My heart understands when the mother rejects her baby. My heart also breaks in the face of the colt’s yearning for its mother, its many attempts at acceptance and its repeated rejection.
The people of the tribe watch the mother closely, acknowledge the difficulty of her birthing experience, try many ways to help her accept her colt. Nothing works. They hear the sounds of her lonely grieving. They see her separating herself from the herd, and from them. She turns mean.
At last, the people fetch a musician from a different tribe. He comes with a stringed instrument. The estranged mother camel is brought to camp, hobbled, tied to a post and flanked by several people in order to keep her still enough for the musician to hang his instrument from one of her humps. Lying against her side, the instrument catches the wind, humming faint chords. She hears the strands of sound, cocks her head, settles down a bit.
The musician takes the instrument off the camel and begins to play. The young woman who coached the birthing stands beside the camel, stroking the mother’s neck and singing softly with the music. As the song progresses, the mother becomes more and more quiet, and then tears roll out of her eyes and down her cheeks. Her heart opens. The colt is brought to her. She nuzzles her baby, makes soft sounds to it, nurses it.
I thought, "Oh my goodness. Why don't we do something like that for human mothers who remain distant from their babies?" In our culture, we know how to keep a body alive; healing a heart is an altogether different matter. It’s true for each of us that in our wounded moments—those times when pain blinds our eyes and locks up our hearts—we need human touch, patience and sensitive songs more than we need answers, advice or a diagnosis. If you’re concerned about someone who doesn’t seem to be doing very well right now, perhaps the best thing you can do is sit with them and listen to music. Be with them in any way that “seek(s) not to be understood so much as to understand …”