Woman with the Pumpkins by Susanna Marsiglia
Nerida asked Didi, her colleague, to join her for Didi’s first experience of a channelling session. An Aboriginal woman, like Nerida, Didi had wide dark eyes and a ready smile. She began the conversation with several big, serious questions.
Half an hour into the channelling session, curious about her relationship with the younger woman, Nerida turned to Aedgar, ‘Have Didi and I worked together in other lifetimes?’
‘Once,’ the spirit confirmed.
‘Only once?’ She was surprised. She and Didi had a lot in common. Didi brought her books and documentaries to learn from, shared podcasts.
‘On this island,’ Aedgar said. ‘You were both in the same tribe. Teaching about plants, but not in a medicinal way. You were interested in how to make the ground more fertile.’
Photo by Nikola Jovanovic.
Nerida murmured to Didi, ‘Your obsession.’ Mari, the channel, didn’t know about Didi’s passion for soil and sustainable agriculture. But Aedgar did.
‘You must rotate crops.’ He spoke as if he was there, observing them in Australia in that long-ago lifetime. ‘Ensure that the seeding coincides with the phase of the moon, during the right season, to get a better outcome. Better foods than that rotten dried meat. It was about how to prepare food for digestion—that kind of treatment of plants. Making food easier for the body to use it, but not in a medicinal way. You studied the preservation of food too. Not yourselves, but loved ones, had issues with digesting the available fare. You used plants to help everyone feel better, even if they weren’t sick.
‘It was a big job because you were not settled in a certain locality. You’d plant or culture things in the right season in different areas, then you’d re-visit. In your travels, you went from one area to the next and the produce would be ready when you came back to harvest. This involved a lot of planning.’
Farming cassava in Sierra Leone. Photo by Annie Spratt.
He turned towards Didi. ‘This could be an important trade, my dear. You still keep knowledge. If you dig deep inside your mind, you might find it.’
Didi smiled warmly. ‘I feel a real affinity with regenerative agriculture.’
‘There you go,’ the spirit replied. ‘This is the way of the future: having the right parts, for the right climate and the best quality result. If the quality is very good from a nutritional point of view, you don’t require the quantity to compensate.
‘You always had this idea of rotating crops.
‘You can’t work in the desert and plant foods that require a lot of water. That won’t work. You were aware of this seven hundred years ago, my dear.’
Didi contemplated.
‘So, you were of the same tribe,’ Aedgar continued, ‘travelling around. And you told her what to do. “Get those weeds out!”’
Nerida laughed. Didi sometimes told her what to do at work. ‘It’s all right,’ she chuckled. ‘I’ll get the weeds out.’
‘She’s still not very good at it,’ Aedgar confided to Didi. ‘We have to grant that she tries hard.’
‘Yes,’ Didi agreed playfully. ‘Very.’
‘I’m curious about which part of the island we were on,’ Nerida said. She tried to imagine their travels between the different Australian eco-systems as Aedgar described them.
‘You were moving around in the cooler area. Not coastal. South. Big forest, back then. No forest there now. We can’t give you a specific place for this because you had a nomadic lifestyle.’
And the names would have changed. ‘Southeast,’ Nerida contemplated. The southwestern forests were extant, although threatened by wildfires.
‘Ya,’ said Aedgar. ‘In the region when the sun rises.’
The women sat, each listening to their own intuition. ‘Were we Wiradjuri?’ Nerida asked Didi. They both had friends from that big tribe in New South Wales.
NSW Aboriginal Language groups. The southern boundary is a river. Source: Our Languages.
‘Rivers,’ Aedgar said. ‘Forest. And rocky outcrops.’
‘Could have been further south,’ Didi suggested. ‘Are we still supposed to be teaching people these ways of growing food?’ she asked Aedgar.
‘Yes. Many never learned. Some tried to learn, but they never understood. Probably not enough in the head to understand.’ He tapped Mari’s temple. ‘A lot of souls that you knew in other lifetimes have gone somewhere else. Some of them came back like you—to the same place, same island. This knowledge needs to be taught. It is more important than ever.’
Didi asked. ‘Is it possible for us to return to the old ways of caring for the land?’
‘Yeah,’ Aedgar’s tone was sceptical. ‘People will be biting, kicking and screaming if you try to get them back there. Because they judge that they are so advanced, with their poor technology.
‘There have been—‘ he made a short, sharp exhalation, ‘—human existences that were far more evolved in their technology. The issue, invariably, is that they reach a certain point where they consider, “We are the crown jewels of the population of this planet.” This is when it goes bad.
‘You’re not quite there yet, but getting closer. The more some people assume they understand, the more they determine how evolved they are, the more power they want, the more ignorant they get. And then they can’t accept any ideas other than their own. That is the doom of the civilisation.’
He paused. ‘Those kids made little fights and protests. The fights and demonstrations got bigger and bigger (to the surprise of those that have it all). The young ones need to be re-activated. They are needed. We mean the way they think, their mindset—that needs to be supported.
‘You don’t need to go back and live in a cave. But some resources demand being tightly held. Use them sparingly.
Metal recycling in an Armenian garden. Photo by Thomas Lipke.
‘Some religions say, “There’s plenty. All there just for you. And it’s there for you to use it all up.” What sense does that make? “It’s there for you to use it all up?” Because that says enough already: use it all up and it’s gone. Where should it come from, the replenishment?
‘It makes no sense to take all those ‘resources’ out of the earth and then send them somewhere else. You won’t get them back. What you take out of the planet won’t grow back. You must find other ways, other resources to use. You will need the mindset of those young ones growing up now. They’ll find means of different transportation, they’ll create different energies, sufficient for everyone on the earth. We had these discussions a lot with our dear friend.’ He nodded gently toward Nerida.
‘People keep going from one place to another because the grass is always greener on the other side. This needs to stop,’ he continued.
‘And furthermore,’ he said, ‘to damage this planet so badly that they need to go to a different planet! They still don’t understand. You can’t always leave a mess behind and then go somewhere else.
‘That’s the insensitivity that comes with too much power, in people that think they’ve got all the knowledge. Once they start thinking, “I know it all,” ignorance breeds. They won’t be able anymore to realise how much they don’t perceive. So many things they don’t understand.’
A deep quiet enveloped the room.
‘You understand?’
Didi nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Is it true,’ Nerida asked, ‘that if we’re creating in our lives it’s best not to think about how to get where we wish to be but to go for the feeling of where we prefer to be? For example, if I want to teach people about soil, I imagine myself growing things, happy in my garden, talking to others. But trying to plan how it’s going to happen, where the money’s coming from, where the garden will be—that could get in the way. Is that correct?’
‘Yes,’ Aedgar said. ‘Be careful if you use that term ‘truth’. Because true means something different for everyone. But your idea is feasible. If you do something you believe in—I am not talking about religion—you trust in what you do, you might experiment. Because only failures teach you how to evolve.
We learn from failure. Photo from Josh Marshall.
‘While you try things that turn out to be failures, you mature and learn to do things differently, if you’re intelligent. People see, “Oh, this person got wonderful crops, plants, fruits.” They’ll come and ask, “How did you do this?” You can tell them. They might fail, too, and try something different. So the knowledge evolves. It’s gonna be shared. This is how teaching should progress.
‘If you say, “This is how you do this. There is no other way,” would anyone listen?
‘Nuh.’ Nerida grunted.
‘That’s your problem in sending your children to school. Someone makes rules, who says, “We know it all. This is what they must learn. This is how it works.” If a child has a different idea, they’ll give them terrible marks to be sure they won’t get anywhere. Those kids will be treated as revolutionaries, you know? As if they could become dangerous people.
‘But those children could have much better ideas. Even though they’re younger, of a younger ‘age’ in this setting, they might be much more evolved than that person who said, “Here are the rules, this is what you do. Because we know it all.”
‘That’s the ignorance. The higher you get up in those systems, the more ignorant you become. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Nerida said. Didi agreed.
Aedgar concluded. ‘Teaching means inviting others to have an adventure, choose the part they need or they want from that experience and take their learning further. This might get them completely out of the rule book, far from the context of what was taught in the first place, but creating and growing something beautiful. That’s what this system of education does not understand.’ He paused and asked, ‘Are we having a rant? Again?’
Nerida smiled softly. ‘Not at all. Lovely to hear you talking on this theme.’
School students strike against Climate Change. Perth, Australia 2019. Photograph by Gnangarra.