A good love letter
I have spent most of my adult life in Botswana and I always live as close to nature as circumstances will allow. I know better than to make promises about what the bush will offer. The animals are not performers. The wilderness does not bend to our will.
And yet.
Photo by Birger Strahl on Unsplash
There are times when the relationship between sincere human attention and the natural world produces something so precise, so unhurried in its arrival, that coincidence becomes an inadequate explanation. The bush always has its answers.
This particular safari was with a group of women, mostly American photographers, travelling through the Okavango Delta and north to the Chobe. From the very first morning, they wanted leopards. In the Okavango this is considered an ambitious wish. Leopards are the most secretive of the big cats, masters of invisibility even when they are directly above you. You can spend weeks in the Delta and never see one.
We saw one every day.
What They Asked For
The first morning: a leopard. It came.
The second day, emboldened, they asked for a leopard in a tree. This is considered nearly impossible. Leopards in trees are invisible by design: the dappled light, the horizontal branch, the rosettes that dissolve into shadow. You drive past them without knowing. We found one. Draped along a branch, tail hanging, watching us with complete indifference.
Then they asked for a leopard with a cub.
She had twins.
By this point something had shifted in the group. They were not passive observers waiting for the bush to perform. They were in genuine conversation with it, asking with the particular quality of attention that is neither demanding nor detached, but open and sincere and willing to receive whatever comes. That quality, I have come to believe, changes what is possible. The San knew this. Every indigenous culture that has lived in deep reciprocity with the natural world has known it. We are only just beginning to find language for it again.
A Pilgrimage Inside the Safari
One of the women in the group was carrying something heavier than a camera. She had come to Botswana on a private pilgrimage, to honour her daughter who had died. Her daughter’s spirit animal, she believed, was a wolf. There are no wolves in Botswana. But we have African wild dogs, sometimes called painted wolves, one of the most endangered and least commonly seen predators on the continent. She asked my son if he could help her find them. He promised he would and then spent an anxious night wondering how on earth he was going to deliver on such a promise.
A pack emerged from the bush early next morning at the very start of our game drive. Young ones, frolicking around the vehicle, tumbling over each other in the particular exuberant chaos of adolescent wild dogs who have not yet learned to be cautious. The number of them, the age of them, corresponded in a way that stopped the breath: they seemed to mirror her daughter and her daughter’s friends who had also died.
I will not over-explain what happened in that moment. Some things arrive complete and do not need interpretation. What I will say is that she received it as the gift it was, and that the bush, as it so often does when we come to it with genuine grief and genuine openness, gave back in kind.
The Love Letter on the Chobe
By the time we reached the Chobe River, the group had been in a sustained field of this kind of attention for days. We were on a boat, drifting on the water, when we spotted a leopard lying under a tree far across the floodplain. What gave her away were the safari vehicles clustered around her like midges.
I suggested we try something. We settled into a short meditation, perhaps eight minutes, sending the leopard our love and our genuine lack of agenda. And then, because this is the part that matters most, we tried to release the image entirely. Holding too tightly collapses whatever field you are trying to open. You have to mean it and then let it go.
We waited a few minutes. Then the boat guide started the engine. I wanted us to move away so that we released our expectations of a response to the meditation entirely. We had reversed less than a foot when she rose.
What happened next, the poem says better than I can.
The leopard was hidden far across the floodplain.
All we could see were the jeeps
Buzzing like blowflies around it.
Fat, lazy, blue-armoured things with bulging eyes.
We were selkies in a boat on the river,
Calling her down from the shade of her tree,
Our invitations like distant love letters from schoolchildren,
Irresistibly innocent.
She padded across the plain directly into our hearts,
Sometimes God can’t resist a good love letter.
What the Photographers Understood
These women had come to Botswana to photograph wildlife. They left with something harder to frame but more lasting: a direct experience of what becomes possible when a group of people genuinely quieten their own noise and open, without agenda, to the world around them.
The leopard did not come because we performed a technique. She came because something in the quality of our attention created a different kind of invitation. The wild dogs did not arrive as consolation for a grieving mother because we asked them to.
They arrived because grief, when it is carried cleanly and openly, without armour, speaks a language the natural world recognises.
This is what indigenous wisdom traditions have always understood and what we in the modern world are slowly, haltingly remembering: that we are not separate from the natural world, observing it from behind glass. We are part of it. The quality of our inner state is not a private matter. It radiates. It is received. And the wilderness, when we truly arrive in it, responds in kind.
Come to Botswana slowly. Bring your grief, your questions, your willingness to be surprised. Leave your agenda at the border.
The leopards are watching.
Written by Robyn Sheldon, soul safari guide with over 40 years experience in guiding spiritual journeys and life on the Okavango Delta, Botswana.
This piece recounts a wildlife photography safari through Botswana's Okavango Delta and Chobe River, where a group of women photographers encountered leopards, a leopard with cubs, and a pack of African wild dogs — framed as a reflection on presence and non-attachment in wildlife encounters.
