The Thread

A short story to summarise...

Photos I have taken along the way...

I was born here, in Kenya.

Some of my earliest memories of my childhood - are the smell of my granddads binoculars - watching wildlife and landscapes.

At school I collected ladybugs. I would cut some grass and stick it in my backpack and go home. Unzipped so they could breathe. They’d obviously mostly flown by the time I got home (into my hair!) and I would then put them in their natural habitat - a toy truck with a stack of grass obviously.

This thread, woven through my childhood. Perhaps this thread was the start of a life guided by instinct, something forming my essence, my connection to nature.

Though from a young age, I was plagued by the world’s inequalities and existential questions. Why do some people starve? Why do some not have houses? Why do some suffer and others live frivolous? What is our purpose and our meaning? What is life after death? Can I work this out or create the change that needs to happen?

I wasn’t very good at school and struggled with grades. Except art and biology. I could geek out on how plants source their food. How roots move underground and find the buffet of nutrients and signal to the plant - “hey team this is the good spot”! How hormones in the root would tell cells to grow towards sun or to water. Another hormone telling cells to divide and grow upwards.

I collected tadpoles and caught frogs too. Fascinated by metamorphosis stages. How these tadpoles turned into something with limbs that hopped!

I learnt about gastrulation and blastula cell changes - something called cell fate determinism. It makes me think of our own free will and determinism. Maybe this kid with lady bugs in her hair was destined to go study zoology and was meant to chase the wild places?

Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I did. My life became a journey and a search—for species, for landscapes, for something I couldn’t quite name. I followed this thread.

I hitchhiked from London to Morocco, another time through Europe to get to Istanbul. I worked and lived in Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Myanmar. Travels that luckily a lot of my work took me to but a lot of travel outside of that I did in solitude. These are the trips that really stayed with me. To forests to find particular Hoolock gibbons because their sound is one of the best in a jungle. To islands to scuba dive down to find a certain mandarin fish or on my 30th when I travelled 20 hours to west Papua to swim in the most biodiverse reefs and to find Wilson’s Bird of Paradise. A bird with OCD tendencies of keeping its nest clean (mostly to allure the ladies). Or finally going to explore beyond Wallace’s line - a thin invisible line that cuts the world demonstrating how geographic and evolutionary forces have shaped species and the divide between species I grew up seeing in East Africa and working in S.E Asia to species in Australia.

So I followed the thread. I spent one New Years camping solo on an island, off an island (Tasmania). Alone, just me and a Wombat, hanging out on the start of the year. Some bucket list species - I found an Echidna and the elusive Platypus - a mammal that lays eggs but has webbed feet like a frog and a bill like a duck and has venom like a snake ! I met trees so huge - in spirit and size. I watched clouds of bats over forest canopies at dusk. I hiked through to find orangutans and counting turtle hatchlings on remote islands under starlit skies. At each point mesmerised, feeling so lucky and feeling so alive.

The thing about this search is that you have to make peace with the waiting, the uncertainty. You might see the species, you might not. So much of it is about luck, about the journey itself. I found solace in that solitude, a quiet empowerment in escaping the noise of expectations and obligations.

A bit of relief from the pressures of society or expectations of what I felt I should be doing. But connecting to my essence (and hopefully impacting and changing the world I so wanted to do when I was a kid). There was guilt in the background at times, for being far from family, for not going back often enough. But there was also a quiet joy in living a life I’d dreamed of. One that felt like mine.

I think maybe I was searching for something more - a purpose, a meaning, was I maybe just always trying to find what felt like home?

A migration. What so many species are just innately programmed to do. At what felt like the right time - I got a job offer back home -and like an arctic tern or a green turtle or a monarch butterfly- I followed this thread, and I came back to where I started.

And now, here I am, finding myself caught in the tension of it all. What inspires me and fills me with joy, and the weight of trying to do this work in a world so heavy with its own undoing.

But still, I follow the thread.

It’s all I know how to do.

Even if the thread isn’t always light. And even if I’m still stuck with this feeling of searching for something but not quite sure what! And still plagued by the existential questions and inequalities that are still so rife and break me.

Wilson’s Bird of Pardise, West Papua. A special moment