Pensive portrait by Sharon McCutcheon.
Conversation with Aedgar flowed freely. The light outside was golden. Flocks of birds called as they crossed the afternoon sky. Nerida’s attention was fixed on the Ancient Spirit speaking through her wife’s body. She asked whether any benefit arose from such a grim and difficult period.
‘Yes.’ He leaned Mari’s head forward. ‘Get a different point of view: insight into what is important and what is not.’
‘Uhuh.’ She felt that was happening. ‘Since the Pandemic started, a lot of people had to stay home. Some of them work from home. Some of them were not able to do their usual work and had to reassess what they want to do. I enjoyed working from home.’
‘Well, there is nothing wrong with it. You would need a lot less of these stupid means of transportation.’ He nodded. She knew Aedgar’s opinion of fossil-fuelled cars.
Valuable work in Firuzkuh, Iran. Photo by Hossein Ghaem.
‘If you need to go out to plant or to harvest, that’s a good reason to go out,’ he said. ‘If you need to do things to keep your fellow human beings fed and clothed, that’s a good thing.’
‘And healthy.’ Nerida said, speaking up for herself and her colleagues at the hospital.
‘Yes, that’s right. We sense there were big shocks for some people. The ones that don’t really produce things. Sitting there, some of them got a tiny bit of insight, waking up to, ‘What am I doing? Does it make sense? Should I go in a different direction?’
‘Yeah, well, you should. If you have those thoughts, you should. You think, ‘Oh I can’t do anything.’ You’ve got a brain. Use it to learn. You can gain skills that are a lot more useful.’
‘Yes.’ She thought of the youth who could do so much more than making and serving coffee or overpriced food, read a computer screen script to someone on the phone or generate internet traffic.
Aedgar tilted the head and lifted an index finger for emphasis. ‘The other thing is this: there were people living in those accommodations who are called a family. Some of them might have realised, ‘I’m living with strangers.’
‘First, when humans meet, it’s about love and spending time together. Then, it’s about going separate ways to make paper with numbers on it. Sometimes in very unproductive ways: being parasites on everything else.
‘Then they come back home. So, there is a way of becoming estranged.
‘Then they produce little human beings. And they say, ‘This came out of love.’
‘But the attention span is very short in your time. So, that one is cute, it’s interesting. It’s the same when they get little animals: it’s cute, it’s interesting. Then they go out away from them. A lot of them can’t wait to go out. Or they take those little humans, or animals away, somewhere else. So they won’t see them all day.
‘They come back. They put them to bed. It’s quiet. (Or not, sometimes).’
Bedtime. Photo by Annie Spratt.
‘So, now all these people are living in that accommodation and none of them is used to each other. The children are little nuisances. Because they are tiny people. They have their own ideas. They miss the people they spend all day with. And their little friends.
‘The adults who are now with them in the accommodation are like strangers.
The little ones think, ‘Why would I spend time with them? They yell at me. They don’t play with me. They feed me horrible things,’ for example.
The adults go, ‘How could I produce something like this? This is not me. I was made for these higher levels in society. I can’t clean these little bums. This is not me. But no one can come and take that job away from me now.’
‘So, if they have a partner that they share it with, they try to put it onto the partner. The partner says, ‘Nah, that’s not me either. I’ve got more important things to do.’
And then they realise they’re all strangers in that accommodation. And they can’t get out. And no one else can come in to help them.
‘We say, ‘Have a go. Handle it. Expand your horizon. Learn from it.’
‘We hear, ‘Oh, we are no teachers. We can’t tell those kids. They won’t listen!’
‘It’s because they are not used to you. You see them on what you call a weekend. Sometimes on holidays. But then some of these children get, literally, shipped off somewhere else.
‘So, ‘Oh yeah, we produce them. They’ll pay the taxes someday. But other than that we won’t have anything to do with them.’
‘That’s very sad.
‘Amusing at the same time—just observing it.’
‘You’ve painted a vivid picture,’ said Nerida. She imagined a hundred unhappy homes as he spoke. She was puzzled about one thing, though. ‘So when we’re in spirit, before we come back to be babies and children, we sometimes have insight into our parents and choose which family we would like to grow with, to learn?’
‘Yes. But it’s a basic plan,’ he said. ‘That spirit might think, ‘I could have those opportunities to learn from and broaden my experience. I have a good chance with those two, the way they look at the moment.’ But they will change. Children grow. And then your basic plan might change into something else. It is not set in stone.
‘You can try and communicate, work around things, try to keep sight of the goals you wanted to achieve. This is what makes it interesting. These are opportunities to learn.’
Making her way around obstacles on a South African adventure course. Photo courtesy Jaco Pretorius.
Nerida nodded, feeling she had an ‘interesting’ life.
‘Yes, children know what they are getting into at the point of their arrival and a short period after,’ he said. ‘But it’s like a big living being, a family. It changes its form.
‘Sometimes someone else comes in to join the family. ‘Oh, I see my best opportunity with those. Oh, there is one there already. It might slow me down. You know, I might need to fight that one, if I can’t convince them. Because I’m the second or the third one. If I can’t convince them because I’m smaller, I’m gonna fight them. Trying to get those parents onto my side because I am the little one.’
‘The little ones, the last ones, will get a lot more of what they want than the ones who came first. Do you understand? The first ones will just leave as soon as possible. You will see that a lot.’
Nerida agreed. She and Mari were both eldest children who’d left their families young. She was puzzled, though. ‘So even from a non-physical perspective, a spirit can plan to be competitive with a sibling?’
‘No. That happens—‘
‘—when they’re born?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah.’
‘They come with a basic plan, ‘This is what I wanna achieve. Where are the best chances for me to do so?’ And then it starts, the whole thing starts to move. It’s not a static environment, the family they come into. It’s continuously moving. Should be evolving.
‘Sometimes it just goes in circles and you can’t see the way out. Because when you feel the need to blame everybody else, you can’t see what’s around you.’
‘I think you described it once as if they’re building a tightly-woven basket around themselves— a couple,’ Nerida recalled. ‘And they create challenges for themselves but they can’t achieve their goals. It becomes more and more of a trap that they’ve created for themselves. And then the little one, who was attracted to the love that was there, can’t feel the love any more.’ She’d thought about this idea since Bartgrinn talked about it in 2014.
Aedgar said evenly, ‘A lot of little ones couldn’t feel the love in that recent period. Because they were in that accommodation with strangers. Do you understand?’
‘I do. We have a generation of children coming up with kind of a hole in their spirit.’
‘To put it in a blunt way,’ Aedgar said, ‘they get produced, they will be outsourced to somewhere else and occasionally they come back. And occasionally, if they’re old enough and the parents are too old, or the siblings, so that they will need to support them.
‘Or, they are—for some parents—the children are accidents, in their mind.
‘For others, they are status symbols. ‘Look what I have produced. So wonderful to look at. Just don’t listen to it.’ Or, ‘Look I produced that wonderful thing. And that thing went on to the highest levels of education!’ They might think, ‘I was never bright enough,’ but they won’t tell you that. ‘I set that one up,’ they say. ‘So everybody can admire my abilities.’
‘As we said, those little humans are created, mostly, out of love. If you create something out of love, you will allow it to grow, to expand, to be educated mostly by yourself. Then there can be additional education from other people that know more about other things than you do. So they can get the best of everything. But it’s the main chore of the parents to look after their children. Because now people can see, that productivity, economics, all this is nothing. It’s nothing.’
Insight into what is important. Annie Spratt photo.
‘People could have gotten insight into what’s important. It will be quickly forgotten, mostly. But there will always be that little reminder in the back,’ he gestured to the back of Mari’s head, ‘that will come up now and then.’
‘Mhmm.’
‘Until it wakes up again. It will.’
He means the virus, Nerida thought. The sky outside was darkening. The serious atmosphere deepened.
‘It will never go away. It changes. When it comes back, it won’t be recognised because it will look different.’
Nerida felt her mouth dry. ‘So people might be dying of kidney failure or something wrong with their brain or their heart and it’s the virus but it won’t be recognised?’
‘It will take quite a while before it will. Because everyone is waiting on more of the same, and it won’t be,’ he said.
‘M’Hoq Toq called it a shape-shifter,’ she said.
Aedgar reflected a moment. ‘That’s a fairly accurate way of describing it.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yes.’