Wood spirit image from Amber Avalona.
Didi widened her brown eyes and asked Aedgar, ‘Is there a message people need to hear for this time?’
Aedgar made a small sigh. ‘They have misused things. Like, ‘Everyone is in this together.’ And ‘Everyone will get through this.’ If you hear it many times, almost all the time, it loses its meaning.
‘It is true,’ he continued. ‘Everyone is in it. It is true that the Universe is trying, spirits are trying, to help humankind.’ He paused a moment. ‘The best thing that could happen it that the virus partners up with another one. Scientists might call it a mutation, like a severe mutation. So, it is going to look for a different host—something other than human beings.’
This was intriguing to Nerida. Spirit was working on persuading COVID-19 to take another form?
Aedgar said, ‘We always come. And we enjoy talking to people. And we always come because there is hope—hope in the real sense of hope, meaning this will get better. Not ‘hope’ as an excuse. Like doing something wrong and then ‘hoping’ the problem will solve itself.
‘This thing was created and released, by fellow human beings, on this planet.
‘It did not come by itself. Like a ‘miracle’.’ He dripped sarcasm.
‘So, immunity won’t happen,’ he said. ‘There might be some form of treatment with strong herbs, that can be used to soften the impact of it. But there won’t be a medicine that you give to someone who is very sick and then that person will be saved: this is not going to happen.’
Nerida, the doctor, bridled at the idea. How could the spirit dismiss the idea of immunity or curative treatment with the wave of a hand?
There is power in wishes and desire. Photo from Hangzhou, China by Dan Ma.
Switching gear, he reassured them. ‘When you are asking the Universe for something better, you’re activating your spirits. Your longing ensures that the Universe knows this thing has to mutate, to evolve from the form it is in right now into something different.’
‘Yes,’ Didi said, fascinated that prayer and intention might create such a result.
‘Because at the moment,’ Aedgar said, ‘nothing has changed since it first occurred. It is spread more widely. You understand?’
Didi nodded. ‘People haven’t got the message yet,’ she said. Her lips were set firmly. She had the idea that people had to learn new ways of living, different ways of caring for each other and the environment, to evolve, in response to COVID-19.
‘That’s right. More people need to understand what this situation requires.’ Aedgar tilted the head. ‘We’re talking about geographic separation. You have to take everyday precautions to keep from catching it. But it’s more than that. These things don’t see. They don’t care about geographic borders or lines.
‘It has to do with the climate that you’re in. That makes you more or less susceptible. It prefers the cold over the heat. It lasts a very long time on cold surfaces, no matter what that surface is.’ Aedgar expounded. ‘It can travel in the cold. And it can travel as frozen water, for example.’
Nerida was horrified by the idea of the virus travelling in frozen food.
Aedgar suggested that the virus can travel in frozen water, alarming Nerida. Photo by Raysonho.
‘It does not like the salt water in the ocean,’ Aedgar went on, as if he saw the export ships she had in her mind. ‘So frozen foods, for example, need to be cooked. Or you remove the skin of what you eat if you can’t cook it.’
Nerida, who travelled a lot, understood such precautions. But she raised her eyebrows when Aedgar said, ‘At the moment, it is not in the soil. But it can come anytime.’
Another shocking idea. No immunity? Contaminating their produce?
‘Society needs to be careful now how they use water. You understand? This virus enjoys being in humid areas.’ He measured his words. ‘Does not like the heat, though. So humidity combined with heat is safer than a humid, cooler place.’
Nerida and Didi were quiet, thinking of climates in different places they knew, people they loved in those places.
‘The problem is that if you tell this to fellow human beings, they’ll say, ‘This is not scientific. You are out of your mind.’ But, it’s them that are not in their right minds. They’re playing the game of blaming each other. No one wants to be responsible.’
‘How about a vaccine?’ asked Nerida.
‘We told you about that immunity.’
She didn’t want to hear that. ‘Hmm. It’s not gonna work?’
‘If you can’t become immune to something,’ the spirit explained patiently, ‘what would be the point of triggering the immune system?
‘They will try,’ he mused. ‘The vaccine will weaken the recipients of it. And it will have some effects later on that they did not see coming.’
Nerida was appalled.
He said, ‘Keeping things clean, staying away from very busy places: these are the only things you can do at the moment.’ Deep inside she felt that what he said was probably true.
‘And asking spirit to convince that thing,’ he said, ‘as we do, to find another host, by marrying that friendly other thing that’s out there, waiting for it.’
Nerida and Didi looked at each other and then laughed, startled.
‘You’re tempting it with romance?’ Nerida chortled.
Spiral galaxies embracing. Photo courtesy European Southern Observatory/Juan Carlos Muñoz.
‘If that’s what works, we’ll try,’ he said.
Nerida had to think. If everything has consciousness, can even a virus be led by love or connection to another path? By spirit? It was a mind-blowing idea. She smiled with Didi at Aedgar. ‘Thank you,’ she said, trying to grasp the concept. ‘We appreciate the efforts. Maybe it is the only possible answer we have right now,’ she acceded.
Aedgar said, ‘As humans (or animals), you try to make sure you find another one you like well enough. These things are not so different. They’ve got consciousness. Which, on the other hand, enables them, also, to find the ‘right’ victims.’
Nerida was familiar with the idea that a person’s death is an integral part of their life. But so many much-loved people gone from the planet. How could he say that?
‘Some of the people who succumbed said, ‘I’ve had enough of this world. I don’t wanna be here anymore. I can’t watch this any longer, how they’re going to destroy themselves and the planet.’ He stopped a moment. ‘Do you understand?’
Didi nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Good. You are one of the few, you know,’ Aedgar spread the hands generously. ‘There are not many out there that would understand that.
‘There were some young ones who would understand. But now they’re scared. They feel a bit guilty. ‘We were talking about pollution and climate and this pandemic is so much bigger.’ But it can actually support them.’
‘The virus supports the climate?’ Didi asked.
‘Yes. It helps.’
Didi understood. ‘We needed to stop.’
‘Yes. So, that thing that’s happening at the moment is part of it.’ He paused, then explained, ‘This was not how it was planned. The virus was not planned to be around to help solve the problems of the planet. It was created to kill in specific areas where it would be released.’ He was emphatic and didactic. Nerida, who had heard this idea from Aedgar (and the other spirit beings) before, still found this deeply disturbing. She shifted in her chair. `
‘But everyone at the moment is looking at the model of the Spanish Flu,’ he said. ‘There were very different ways of travel and distribution then. Here, they did not understand how much more rapid the spread of it would be. It goes on one person. It goes to the other side of the world. And suddenly, it’s everywhere.
‘It’s not good to miss an important fact like that. How can that be called scientific? Scientists are not the brightest ones on the planet. A few of them go in one direction, about one tiny thing. If it goes a little to the right or the left, you know, they say, ‘That’s not my specialty. I’ve done my part. Someone else has to do these other parts.’
‘If you lose the view of the whole picture, how can that be scientific? You’re an idiot that focuses on one special, tiny thing. And the more they are specialised—I’m not sure if I should put it in a basic way like this—but the more you specialise, the dumber you are. Because you can’t see anything that’s going on around your very special specialty.
‘So, use caution if there is someone telling you, ‘But I am a specialist on exactly that thing.’ Because they won’t be able to see anything to the side or all-around their ‘fact’, even things that touch and influence it in a big way. They can’t see it. They have not trained to see the bigger picture. You understand?
Didi nodded. Nerida shifted in her chair, feeling her usual discomfort in defence of science. And vaccinations.
‘Is there anything else?’ the spirit asked.
Didi asked brightly, ‘Aedgar, where are you from?’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I have been on this planet, maybe, eight times. And then I’d seen enough.
‘You know, you can live as a rock in a river and watch things go by. You can be a tree. And you can still have more feeling than a human being.
‘We are a spirit that came back, trying to teach. We have been waiting for decades.’ He sounded wistful.
‘We searched for a shell that we might be able to use.
‘The brain is not as advanced as we thought.’
‘We won’t tell Mari that,’ Nerida laughed. She had no doubt about the beauty and facility of her wife’s brain.
‘We were trying to get as much different education into it as we could.,’ Aedgar continued. ‘This individual has done well. We wish this individual, our friend, or host, would have paid more attention to the things you call science. We could be more eloquent in the way we talk and try to explain things if we could find the words in those dusty drawers up in that brain.
‘We found a perfect match for us. But sometimes we are quite limited in the way we’re able to express ourselves. We have chosen this shell, or vessel, a very long time ago. And we had to convince that one, several times, to stay on this planet.’
Nerida inclined her head. Darling Mari almost died several times, even a couple of times when she was only little. So grateful she came back.
‘It’s a great opportunity to have, to be able to talk to humans beings,’ Aedgar said. ‘So we go somewhere else, you could say into the Universe, if we’re not here, talking. We shift some things around at times, up there. We’ve always got important things to do.
‘We are working together so that this planet does not get damaged even further, by all the junk that humankind has put up there. Sometimes we have to create a different path for other things in the Universe that fly past. Sometimes we come in to protect our shell. We have done it on aeroplanes.
Space Junk by Miguel Soares.
‘But usually, we reside in the so-called Universe. It’s not a Universe because it’s so much bigger than you think. ‘Multiverse’ gets closer, but still doesn’t cover it.’
Nerida got up to turn the air conditioner off. The room was suddenly quiet.
She asked Aedgar, ‘You were involved in the creation of this planet?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We do spheres and other things.’
Nerida smiled and said, ‘Aboriginal Dreamtime stories talk about Creator Beings shaping the mountains, forming the rivers. Is there some truth in those stories from your perspective?’
Aedgar inhaled softly. ‘It is very hard to explain how this happens to human beings. It’s like the way human beings should work or function more than they do. You feel what you want. You feel and you think what you want. We’re not sitting up there with a piece of clay. We’ve got no body. We have no hands. We feel.
The Pillars of Creation, NASA photograph from the Eagle Nebula, 2014.
‘So the creation is different than, you know, take a rib from someone, use a bit of clay and make someone else. That’s an entertaining story. It is not quite how it happened.
‘It’s a fusion of feelings of many beings that creates things.
‘And yes, you’re not alone.
‘And no, you’re not the most intelligent out there. That’s all we say at the moment.’
Didi said, ‘I don’t think we had any doubts about that.’
‘There are plenty of human beings around who have the sincerest doubt,’ Aedgar countered. ‘They are confident that they are the most intelligent, not only for their species. They take that illusion very personally. Unfortunately, it can be the ones with least intelligence that seek power, trying to control things. It should not be that way.’
Nerida spoke up. ‘Can’t we persuade the Coronavirus to have a tendency to go for those that are caught in dead ends, refusing to learn anything, and having lots of that power? It might help. I know I sound like a terrorist if I say things like that. I’m not a terrorist.
Aedgar raised an eyebrow and said with a half-smile, ‘That’s what you say.
‘You see, they have their own experiences to make. They have to endure their own failures.
‘They create horrible things. As we told you—how many times?—if you think about the idea that you will come back, that you’re born again—’
‘Uhuh.’
‘—you will be the one that has to endure what you’ve created before. People say, ‘We have to save the planet for the children and the grandchildren.’ Actually, you have to save it for yourself.
‘As long as humans here don’t understand that—and this is not a good thing—it will take a long time. They have to go through all again: being born again, growing up again, not being able to clean themselves, talk, walk. The whole experience. Just to realise, ‘Oh, what kind of thing have I chosen to come back to?’
‘Congratulations. You helped to create that mess. Deal with it.
Nerida turned to Didi. ‘Do you have any more questions you’d like to ask? You’re welcome to ask about your health or past lives, relationships or anything.’
Didi looked down with a smile. ‘I have a silly question.’
‘Questions are never silly,’ Aedgar said.
‘I feel that the spirit of my dog was the spirit of my cat who passed.’
‘Yes. They do these things, yes.’
‘Very similar…’ she prompted.
‘The spirit has chosen to come back as a dog because cats are not supposed to be in this area,’ Aedgar said.
‘Oh.’
‘That’s a clever spirit,’ Nerida said. It was true. Cats were not allowed as pets in their district because of the threat they posed to native animals.
‘Yes. Spirit was sure you would recognise it. Not in the first second. Maybe in the fifth. So to speak. You know we are not good at time. You would have experienced moments when you thought, ‘Oops, I’ve seen that before.
‘And actually, you can see it in the eyes. It was not quite sure at the beginning if it would wanna stay in that clumsy body. It was used to moving in a more sophisticated way.
‘Being in that other animal it felt quite free.
Photo by Jamie Street.
‘Dogs are more prone to serve you. They wanna make you happy.
‘The cat is more like, ‘I don’t care. I’m around. This is my space. And what you want from me? I don’t care.’ Dogs are happy to serve. So the spirit had a little trouble adapting to that. But spirit says it was worth it, ‘cause it wants to be back with you.’
‘Yep, I know,’ Didi whispered.
‘It will always come back, that one,’ Aedgar said. ‘Keen to have new experiences.’