Mosaic pattern by David Zydd.
Bartgrinn’s words are written this way.
Nerida’s are like this.
This is an isolated community of Native people. It’s troubled here now—different to how it used to be. Perhaps you might have a look around and tell me your impression of the place.
Different thought streams of people: like fire and water. The energy’s a bit like water in lines—’creeks’, you might say. And they all have a connection, somehow.
It’s like a grid and someone puts ‘electric power’ in one end—in the form of thoughts that are not so good in a community—and it spreads out.
If you touch it at the other end, you’ll get hit by it.
If you look at it sometimes—and you don’t put your finger into it—it looks peaceful. It’s just water, calm water. But someone put some electric power, like battery poles, into it.
As soon as you touch it—no matter at which part of the creek, everything that’s wet, these parts that are interconnected—you put your finger in it and you get the real thing.
We would think it is unusual.
[Sigh. Long pause]
Hmm.
It’s a bit like an invasion, you might call it, of a different species, almost.
It’s coming from the outside.
But that’s the closest way of expressing it that we can think of, is this electricity that you can’t see.
Imagine the mouth of a river, a very wide one, with these lines of water building, connecting. If you walk on the sand between the water, it’s alright.
As soon as you touch the water you get hit by it.
Electrical currents. Pattern by Melanie Simon.
The current in this water is getting stronger.
There’s a group of people that try to drain it.
While in other areas, people add more of the water that can carry that bad thought or that charge that is painful if you get hit by it.
It is dangerous.
There are four groups: one putting that charge in, one trying to drain it away. The others are trying to flood it all, and another group who can’t see the problem.
It is only safe and sustainable if you try to stay out of that water. But it’s a fine line to balance in some areas here. It’s almost like walking on a rope. I’m sorry to mix metaphors if I say walking on a rope because I told you about a grid in the ground, with some water channels in there. I’m trying to describe a very different act of balancing.
So here is this: four different influences. If they are of equal strength, you could find some sort of balance. But as soon as one has more strength than the other three, or two have more strength than the other two, it’s getting out of control.
Do you understand?
I think so. Do the four groups correspond to families or clans here at all? Or not really: there might be people in each family—
There is some influence from the inside, some influence from the outside—
—for each of these groups?
Four essential components of the Medicine Wheel. Original artwork by spiritman.
Yes. It’s not… these groups have different ways of thinking and functioning. It’s not about having a name-tag attached. It’s about the way they’re made to work.
You can have a family that has all four. You can have another family who are all one, from one kind of source, that all are the ones that try to drain, for example, try to drain and help.
Some families have two of those and two of those. You can’t really tell who is pulling in which direction. It can change at any given moment.
You need to be aware of that.
Because if you have all four of those directions within one family, the way they operate, some days they interfere with each other.
One moment, three of them are stronger than one. That single one is weaker than the others. But if that one gains strength again, trying to rip that group apart…
You could say it’s about a group of family members, but it could be any group of humans trying to achieve something together.
None of the people within one family are the same. That’s why you can’t say it’s this group or that group. Or these ones pulling this way, or those ones pulling that way.
This is not how it works, especially not here.
There is some influence coming from the outside. It’s almost like a pathogen.
You can’t see it but it’s there.
Some of them are affected by it but they don’t know it. Everybody else knows it because that’s how they act.
So, it’s a bit like—you could see it this way—the moment they put more power into the water on one end, there is a switch that does not work.
Well, there is no switch in there.
[Pause.]
There is some sort of blame. Each group blames the other group. Even if they have all four thoughts in their group, they still blame all the others. There is no insight that ‘Our groups consists of four different parts: if they’re all balanced, they can work together. If they’re all the same strength. If one is not so strong, it’s already out of balance and it’s not gonna work’.
And it takes only a tiny thing to make it tilt over.
Mhmm. Somebody looks at somebody the wrong way. Somebody says the wrong thing.
Yes. Because it’s about blaming each other. You can’t say they are envious, like, ‘He’s having this. She has that.’ No, it’s not that.
It’s like, ‘You’re doing this and I don’t. I’m better than you.’ But then, the one saying, ‘I’m better than you,’ has someone within their group that’s as bad or worse than the other one.
No group is the same.
And no group is superior to any other.
No. This is the problem they have.
There’s a rift between them.
Instead of saying ‘We’re one group. We complement each other. We work better if we consider all of the thoughts that are around and use all of the different energies that we have to support everyone. Instead of doing that, they have a game or an attitude where they blame each other.
We would say there are groups here that should not live together in the same area because they never have. But then, with, ‘Oh, I’m gonna add you to my group,’ and ‘You should go over there,’ it’s all mixed up. It got a bit lost—the knowledge that within that group there is someone who should not be here, has never been here, is energetically not a match for this area. But they’re here.
There are some disturbing influences here that might not be disturbing if they were in a different place, with different group.
[Long pause]
Some groups come in here and tell others, blaming them, ‘You should do it this way.’
‘You should do it that way.’
This is not what they need.
They would need support to make them stronger, not blame.
There is a culture in this place. We might not call it ‘culture’. But there is a cultural clash here. People try to help, but at the same time they blame. So that the ones they wanna help just shut down because they don’t feel equal.
Tribal woman making bread in Western India. Photo by Harry Thaker.
Some people have different ideas about how things should work, about things that might work in very different places, but maybe not here.
Some other people here, who belong here, do not understand the way it should work, so they are depending on the ones that wanna help. And yet they are still blamed.
They’re still being blamed?
Yeah. They have to keep them here because they don’t understand. They would have done it differently. But they have to keep those people who blame them here because they can’t handle these things themselves.
And they get blamed for everything. And they can feel they are not evil—equal, sorry. Because the others are evil. The ones who are putting the things in the water.
You can’t see it. It’s not obvious. But it’s there.
It hurts.
Everything comes with blame.
‘You should know by now.’
‘You should have learned that by now.’
It’s not like, ‘I know you knew other things before, that used to work. We brought you different things (that don’t work).’
To have the insight that interference made it worse. The insight is not here.
And the others feel like they will never be equal.
And it’s very difficult to tell because each group can have one that shares that attitude or a few that have that attitude and others don’t. Sometimes it’s balanced. Most of the time it’s not.
[Pause.]
We know it’s a strange concept.
I think it’s a good way of explaining how colonization looks. This place is being colonized.
Yes. Sort of.
It’s a different stage than the diseases and the murders, the massacres. But it’s still colonization that’s happening here.
Yes. It goes: ‘We do things differently. We know better. We have evolved this way of handling what’s coming in the future.’
They can’t see that other groups have evolved in a different direction, but they’re not less evolved than them. They have a different way of operating, a different way of thinking or acting. That does not make them unequal.
We think they should have more power because they know how things work out here. And they did the work with a lot less of an impact on the area, on Nature.
Looking for balance. Cindy Tang photo.
That’s right.
So you will have some groups here—they all do the blaming thing.
There is no envy.
Envy is the first stage of anger.
Envy means, ‘I wanna have what you have.’
The next stage is: ‘You give me what you have because I deserve it. And you give it to me right now.’ This is the stage that this place is at.
Mm. Is that anger?
Yes. It starts with envy, ‘Oh, I wanna have this.’
Then someone says, ‘If you wanna have that you have to do this and this and this. And you have to do it in a different way, as we do. Then you can have it.’
And then they still can’t have it because there is still an imbalance. And they are still not equal. So envy turns into anger.
First the envy makes them try harder to get it, try harder to please them to have the same things. And if this is not happening it turns into anger.
That’s where this place is at.
That’s the stage of anger. Blame and anger because of the imbalance.
Blaming. Every time they do something they are told, ‘You’re not equal. We’re better than you.’
The difficulty is that it happens on all, you would call it, levels.
In every aspect.
Yes.
Every level of thought.
The blaming comes from here, it goes down and around and from here it goes to there and there and there and there.
It’s like rays going through, in all directions.
Someone blames someone: it’s as if they have a reflective ball. They put that reflector up because they are so superior. And that anger and everything else bounces off and goes in all directions.
That’s racism.
It’s everything. All of it. It’s just being different.
Someone has more, you call it, money, than someone else. Someone has a different colour than someone else. Someone has a different age. Someone has different education. Different gender. All of it. It’s on all levels everywhere. Or different belief systems.
Like: ‘You have the wrong gender. You have the wrong colour. You have the wrong belief system. You have the wrong education or no education.’ It’s all of it.
They think, ‘We have a culture that has evolved. But you missed that part because you were concentrating on something else.’
Oh, the people with the money think the others missed that part because they were concentrating on hunting and listening to the earth and stories.
Yes.
I see.
And the others think, ‘Oh, we have been listening to the earth. We have done all this. You have been concentrating on money. That’s why you missed it all. You have no idea.’
So it comes from both sides. There’s blaming from both sides.
[Long pause]
Hmm. There is always hope, you know. But it’s a tiny bit in some areas.
Sometimes the hope’s bigger because the energy is more balanced. [Using the hands like scales] If it tilts a bit that way it gets very unbalanced very quickly.
Normally it could and should tilt in a direction where hope is getting bigger. Somehow this is not happening.
When it’s balanced, it all right. But here, it tilts a bit and the hope dissipates. It takes some effort to be balanced again, just to be on a normal level.
And then, something stupid is done, or even said. It tilts again. The part that should be stronger is not around. There’s not enough of it to make things shift the other way. That’s why it all get so unbalanced so quickly towards the wrong side.
Do you understand?
I think I do. I think it’s a powerful analysis of the situation here and I appreciate it.
Alaskan river delta. Aerial photograph courtesy Mandy Lindeberg NOAA/NMFS/AKFSC
Aah. I have not been here before… but I can see these things happening.
I can almost see that kind of river delta with that kind of ‘water’.
One thing is that you’re a bit outside of it here. This area has more sand between the water lines, but the further you go here and there [moving the hands in other directions around the community] the closer it gets together and the more difficult it gets.
Are we safe here?
Just—because you’re on the edge of it. So if you get closer to the delta these streams get wider. It’s like veins. So if they get wider in some areas you might get a little bit closer to the drama that people attract.
You would need a major change.
Major change of thought, of actions. Very difficult.
So for now you should be safe.