Disclaimer - What I’ve got to say, is my own point of view, and needs to be put in the context of ‘me’. Its not diplomatic or sensitive (or aware) of all the stakes and claims and history surrounding this sensitive issue. All I know, is that the further into the NT we go, the more information I gather, the more feeling I have for the country, the more I want to express how I feel.
This land has been speaking to me since I can remember. I put it down to ‘feelings’, and the ‘not real’ part of life. As I grew older and more drawn to the inner, darker, more spiritual realm of life, I gradually gave my ‘feelings’ more importance. I’m not 100% certain of myself yet. I lack confidence and a certain strength of self that I believe can only occur when I fully accept myself as I am, without fear of being labelled crazy, or being ‘special’ in a negative way, or not being believed.
In my early 20’s, I felt the land speak to me. It told me that we were all one. That it was me, I was it, the people, the land, everything, is the same. It was such a powerful experience, that it changed my life for ever.
I’d suffered, as a teenager, with confusion over how the land was treated, of the existence of roads and cars, and the pollution. I’d suffered with a sense of not being understood, and feeling that the tide of humanity was going too fast for me to comprehend and at a pace that was obviously detrimental to the very centre of our existence. It was just a feeling. I was unhappy and confused and it was hard for me to accept life as it was. I felt out of time and place.
As I begin to read some of the words from different indigenous groups, I hear an echo resounding in my feeling for the country. A sense that all this ‘white fella’ nonsense is breathablely recent, its wounds still open where the dagger cut the skin of this country, and many ‘wrongs’ still unaccounted for. This leaves a balance due and until we face it, until we understand the law of cause and effect, and take responsibility for it, there will always be a feeling of suffocation and still birth in Australia.
When I met Leliyn (Jawoyn traditional name for Edith Falls), what is termed a popular ‘plunge pool’, I immediately felt a constraint in the area directly linked to the water. The water is not for swimming. I heard it distinctly. Later on, we read Bolung rests in the dark pools in Leliyn, and the indigenous people don’t swim there and limit any fishing (even casting part of their catch back as ‘appeasement’ to the supernatural being). I’m not familiar to this story, but what I know, is that something told me not to go in there. It was a ‘dark and dangerous’ place, not for me at this stage in my life. But the air, rolling through the centre of the valley, as I breathed it in during morning meditation, was specifically healing and cleansing. It was the air, in its journey east, that was full of life and joy. And here is the duality within the spiritual realm. The water, in that specific spot, can be ‘bad’ because of negative energy. But the air, joyfully coursing though the valley, just above the shadowy depths, can be light and alive and fill the body with good, positive energy.
How? Why? Who said? How do you know? It is the way. There are no answers for these questions that I know. But these realities are as important to my way of life, as the need for food and water and decent coffee.
What has to be done?
We need to see the positives of paying a little more attention to the dark mystery of the land. Learn its secret places and the code of conduct. Respect that which we can’t touch with our hands and see with our eyes. We can only learn this ‘way’ by being quiet. By tuning in our senses and turning off the TV. We need to open our ears, eyes, heart and mind to the world within the world of gross matter. We need to understand that we don’t know everything. We need to be humble and pay respects to other’s knowledge. Not blindly. But give it consideration. Give it the respect that you would expect if it was happening to you.
And I know its difficult. Because maybe listening to this secret information might mean you have less leisure choices, it might mean money out of the pocket and it might mean curtailing some of the conveniences of modern life. I know the selfishness of the self. I am as human as you. I know the weakness of the self and the selfishness that drives us.
Albert asked me how I felt the ‘negative’ energy in the pool. It flashed in my mind that the water filling the pool was part of a river running through what the Jawoyn people called ‘sickness’ country. Sickness country has been ‘discovered’ to have contamination from uranium in the area. If the water was running through this country, skimming the top off and over time, scouring the bottom of the sickness country, then it could account for the ‘negative’ sensation that I had. I wasn’t sure why it was immediately apparent to me that the rock pools above were ‘safe’ to swim in. Albert suggested that the pools were shallower and the plunge pool more stagnant so as to hold the ‘negative’ energy. Perhaps. It would be interesting to know what the mineral content of the water was in that plunge pool.
The fact is, I don’t know why I feel things sometimes, some good, some bad, sometimes the feeling comes and goes, depending on the time of day. Its all as strange to me as it probably is to you. All I know, is that I wont swim in that plunge pool, and Albert, having lived through enough of these ‘queer’ things happening to me, respects my ‘feelings’ by heeding my advice.
