Where did this Story of Separation begin? It has been a pacy and yet slow unpacking of the very complex story of human separation from nature and the consequent arising of human exceptionalism, that has led to the exploitation of nature and the marginalisation of non-dominant cultures/people. We don’t need a definitive answer to that but there is plenty to establish that it goes way beyond 7 generations prior to our own.
We have slammed language. Colonisation, coloniality, patriarchy, extraction, exceptionalism, appropriation, cosmology, worldview, binary, polarisation, subjugation, domination, systemic privilege, structural racism……. till our brains are bursting and our hearts are soggy boots that you just don’t want to wear anymore! That afternoon, Rose removes her boots and goes barefoot.
And then, “digging deeper, relating wider”, we unearthed a positive story beneath the western colonial worldview that we have inherited and buried deep into the regenerative tentacled fibres of our society. This is a Story of Connection, I exclaim! We found it, says Beau who is passionate about history and representing fuller stories about the past.
This story sits alongside indigenous cosmologies and cultural ways of being in place and community. It is set in Neolithic times, is pre-patriarchal, earth-wise, earth-reverent (likely matriarchal - which is not to simply turn the tables to imagine a society where women dominate), that like indigenous communities, where relationship with nature and within community, are characteristic.
This then, is a historical and cultural heritage that can inspire those of us who are “unsettling settlers” to transform the story of separation into a story (once again) of connection. With Sophie Strand, we are rewilding myths. Narcissus gazes into the pool to find his ecological self, not lost to his selfishness but expanding… to croak of frog, stir of tadpole and reflected flight of bird and cloud. We lower ourselves on a walkway over the local lake to experience this for ourselves, breathe in the silted, silken smell of life amongst duck and caddishfly. We slow down, feel differently in our bodies. As we walk away, green is greener and the ragged trunks of eucalypts drag at our attention.
When the students go to Yarramundi, to begin Grandmother Walking, a journey from the confluence of the Grose River and Dyarubbin to the high places in the Blue Mountains, which they will make over the year, they are enticed by water running over pebbles. They immerse themselves. Piper says she feels the presence of ancestors, Rose agrees.
There is a story here that we will unfold connecting Gurangatty, Creator eel/serpent of this place with a restore, restorying of dragons/snakes; from “monsters” to be obliterated or tamed as in western mythology, to Spirit creators and guardians of eastern, neolithic and indigenous mythology. We are connecting cultural story in this place to a mycellium of mythology that underlies our worldview, in a swim.
