Dreaming the World

Today is filled with brilliant sunlight and stiff breezes, making for frigid conditions. I’ve been inside much to much this past week and would love to take a walk. We might be able to walk in the woods to escape the relentless blow, but most likely the trails are sheet ice which does not work for me as I would be on crutches. I have a pair with ice picks on the bottom but they are not very helpful when all there is is ice.

I almost said something about March in February but this is the coast and wind is a frequent companion, especially after a coastal storm like the one we experienced over the weekend. Still, I would not want to be out on the water today.

I’ve been spending time with my collection of Aboriginal Australian art books. One of the consistent themes voiced by Australian Aboriginal artists is the simultaneous present of past, present, and future, a concept which can be difficult for Westerners to grasp, let alone experience, although some mediators and mystics report moments where all time is now.

Western time tends to be linear, with events having a beginning, a middle and an end. We also, therefore, have winners and losers. Indeed, winning and losing is a concept central to our way of life, particularly in the U.S.. We are so deeply embedded in that ideology that we tend to miss the cyclic nature of events, the simple fact that over time everything returns. It can also be very very difficult for us to think in terms of “we” and to ground our sense of self and meaning in something other than wining or losing.

Yet, in many Indigenous cultures what matters most is one’s embeddedness in family, clan, community, and place. Emdeddedness in each of these categories supports the possibility one might experience time saturated in timelessness. Together, they offer the possibility an entire community may experience states in which time becomes plastic, abstract, and grounded in the now. In such moments the Ancestors and future generations are truly with us.

For many indigenous peoples around the world, colonial powers actively sought (and seek) to splinter this sense of belonging. When successful, this project invariably shatters lives and generations. Yet, often, Indigenous people have held, and do hold, on to their knowledge, stories, and multi-generational experience of belonging. Some people who have been displaced are able to return to country and wholeness, for others this may remain, for now, a project that looks back, acknowledges now, and and anticipates renewal in the future. But of course, it all happened, is happening, and will happen right now.

In times of violence, culture shock, and displacement, situating oneself, and one’s family and community, in the experience of all times being present in the moment, provides a powerful rest-bit from hopelessness and oppression, and a way forward towards a more hopeful tomorrow. Often the arts give us that much needed sense of being firmly in place which is why oppressors attack them. The arts tell us that unlike the the oppressor’s story of winning and losing, there is always a much larger story in which we are all simply beings living our lives in the moment. In the long view there are no winners and losers, there are only stories.