Detail from Aboriginal dreamlines artist Michaelle Possum Nungurrayi “Womens Ceremony”
March 15th, 44 BCE: Julius Caesar was stabbed to death in the meeting of the senate of Rome of that era. This event was immortalized by the seer in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar with the quote “Beware the Ides of March”.
March 15, 1916: Woodrow Wilson invaded Mexico with thousands of troops to capture a Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa
March 15th, 1966: Racial Riots broke out in Watts, LA
March 15th, 1976: Underground bomb detonated, London
March 15th, 2019: People in prayer were gunned down in Christchurch, New Zealand by a man who expressed hate speech against migrants, carried white supremacist rhetoric, and called for all non-European immigrants in Europe he claimed to be “invading his land” to be removed. His words vibrating with other world leaders who are creating hard borders, spewing hatred, and arousing us up into a dream of fear.
Also around this date the mid west experiences a “cyclone bomb” and Cyclone Idai terrorizes and tears the land asunder in Mozambique.
These threads connect over centuries, repeat and repeating. Calling us into a past that cycles. A cycle that constantly reproduces, a haunting, out of control nightmare with nowhere to go, creates terror in the system and we keep waking up in the dream of death… Relentlessly the nightmare reproduces itself without even a slowing down. Feeding the world trauma threshold, we disconnect through our lack of ability to create a true future, an unknown space that we have yet to experience.
March 15th, 2019: Young people across the globe walked out of school and into the streets to cry to the older generation in exasperation of our collective inability to wake up to an overwhelming crisis of disconnection.
“You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. We have come here to let them know that change is coming whether they like it or not. The people will rise to the challenge. And since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.” —Greta Thunberg,15 yrs old, at COP24 world summit.
Since crossing into the 21st century with its’ increased sense of chaos all about us, we are grappling as a world human family, and lurching about in our limited perception of what it means to be living on Mother Earth at this time. There are extensive growing numbers of humans that makes this a unique time in the geological story of life on our planet. There appears a pushing out of our neighboring life with a desperation that translates into a taking and a hoarding the privilege of being human within the bigger dreaming of our planet. Our gifted human family, with abilities to do things differently, is capable of working in resonance with all of life here. All the answers are in the system. It is that we have not, perhaps, stood still enough to listen and face our own contribution to a genuine dilemma.
I can feel us as coming from our past thinking. A fear growing in us of scarcity. A fear of an inhospitable and unfriendly environment. We are all heating up, becoming more extreme in our behavior, inundated with information and noise. We, as a race of beings, are battening down the hatches on a perceived separate and antagonistic world. Gone is the prayer of we as related to all life that appears inconvenient, meanwhile the symptoms of imbalance grow with every passing day. Expressions of raw fear in the face of unknown change and an intangible future are spilling out of us into extreme boundaries, nationalism, and the rise of dictating leadership… As long as we see our future from being rooted in the past, there is no real future. It is just our past recycling in an illusion of future. As I see it, the future comes of being in the present moment and allowing something different to emerge. Fear and defensiveness keeps us rooted in the past. Courage and acceptance is a more fertile field for true future, that which is not written yet. How can we know what is not known yet, and hold that door open for something that does not register as a certain intellectual interpretation..
We live in a world where the unconscious dream is encouraging a reality of scarcity and superiority. Fundamentalism thinking drives the boat of self-negating ideas that create separateness, feelings of superiority, and a desperate grasping as the illusion of safety and security cracks beneath our feet (Christchurch). In the teaching of dreaming, I find myself dedicated to the expansion of conscious dreaming. For to stay in the not-remembering, we contribute to a dreaming force that propels the unconscious nightmare forcibly into our daily life. To not-remember is to go round and round on the wheel of self destruction like a mouse with no capability to stop the turning, by simply jumping off.
Over the last few years, I have had repeating dreams where I go to a concert and the music they are playing I am unable to register as music. There is also meeting with builders that are building new shapes out of light rods, shapes that I find hard to feel symmetry or resonance with. With a western trained ear, I find it hard to appreciate in real life, the quarter tones and smaller variances that are available to middle eastern ears, Indian and beyond. The nuance is lost on my coarser hearing model. I can even experience it as wailing and irritating. With this closed seeing, I find that I am not listening and I tune out.
These dreams of even a more radical sound has shown me that it is taking time to appreciate this new music and new light forms. I am called to submerge myself, to not make old meaning out of the new experience. Patience as my sense of the world is changed out. When I first started my indigenous training in the healing arts, I was told over and over again that we need to unlearn all the ways we look at things. After several years of walking into invisible walls with exhausting hours of mind numbing comparisons and judgements, I began this early renovation of my mind that today, is in a constant unfolding.
I will always wear the face of the colonizer and carry the past of my ancestry. Yet my life has afforded me an opening to another way of being that I respond to like a thirsty deer to water. It has enabled me to shift and see that colonialism endures because of denial. Our western world is deep into it. My next big teaching was then to wake up to Desmond Tutu”s words “ this means I pray for the colonizer as my younger brother who has not matured into the seeing.” I am not separate from my ancestral past. By staying in hatred of what “my people have done” is to become the colonizer of my interior. To truly decolonize is to fall back in love with all of our relations including the “fat takers.” This is our personal journey into the evolving fields upon fields of understanding, and what it means to grow up as a mature citizen of our Mother Earth.
In America and in the majority of countries we eat, breathe and sleep colonialism. Our species as a western organism is writing and telling the story of its own extinction… which for me is the true primitive thinking. The sophisticated thinking is embedded in our earth wisdom cultures. Here are the stories of relationship and connection, of listening and walking in tender of the future generations of all life. This is where the mundane life lives in respect of the greater dreaming that belongs to our Mother Earth.
Climate Change as expressed in the intense weather patterns is not separate from us, but reflects the suppressed seas of trauma and emotion rising up within us. The auto immune is blinking its alarm, the winds of technology and change are beating upon our transparent nervous systems while the finite sense of time challenges our own mortality… for when does the preverbal clock run out the brain asks? For every human life comes the question for how long shall I live… And now that projection is noisy and disturbing as we see it unfold on the world stage, messy and tragic are part of us.
While writing this piece, a snow bomb cyclone terrorizes the mid west and then tropical cyclone Idai rips Mozambique asunder. How indeed is that also part of my sense of belonging and place…and yet it is. Dark forgotten shadows blasting out into the light of day to be felt and seen. How indeed to reconnect through glad heart and create a healing place for all this?
What if the whole human family sat in silence together for just a day and a night… Sat in the quiet of listening, sat in the quiet of not being on the wheel of the past? What if we valued above all an environment that worked to encourage and support all the sentient beings of our world? What if we focused the resources of ourselves and harnessed our imaginations in a dedication to our Mother’s dream, instead of our own? What if we reached over the abyss of so many fissures of self destruction to hold hands and have faith in each others greater dream for the world? What if we touch into the ancient wisdom that still lives within our cells and call upon our inspired ancestors that knew how to live well within turbulent times, and how to shift gears and create change so that we may all be alive today?
May all the what if’s turn into a new dream, a changed positioning of us humans within life, may we all come into the present challenge and face our own mortal dilemma. Life is eternal through the generations of life, may we dream a healthier version of ourselves and others into being. May we be filled with the rising sap of new life and vitality and turn our rising heat into actions of inspired change on behalf of Life. I choose this dream.
Sarah Maclean Bicknell March 24, 2019
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