Life and living according to the tribe is in movement, advancement, and change. They spoke about alive and nonalive time. People are nonliving when angry, depressed, feeling sorry for themselves, or filled with fear. Breathing doesn’t determine being alive. It just tells others which body is ready for burial or not! Not all breathing people are in a state of aliveness. It’s okay to try out negative emotions and see how they feel, but it certainly isn’t a place one would wisely want to stay. When the soul is in human form you get to play—to see how it feels to be happy or sad, jealous or grateful, and so on. But you are supposed to learn from the experience and ultimately figure out which feels painful and which feels great.
Next we talked about games and sports. I told them that in the United States we are very interested in sporting events, that in fact we pay ballplayers much more than we pay schoolteachers. I told them I could demonstrate a game and suggested we all make a line and run as fast as we could. The one who runs the fastest will become the winner. The people looked at me intently with their beautiful big dark eyes, then they looked at each other. Finally someone said, “But if one person wins, everyone else must lose. Is that fun? Games are for fun. Why would you submit anyone to such an experience and then try to convince him he was in truth a winner? That custom is difficult to understand. Does it work for your people?” I just smiled and shook my head “no.”
There was a dead tree nearby, so I asked for assistance, and we constructed a teeter-totter by placing a long limb over a tall rock. It was great fun, and even the oldest members of the group took a turn moving up and down. They pointed out to me there are some things you just can’t do alone, and using this toy was one of them! Seventy-, eighty-, ninety-year-old people had released the child within and had fun playing games not designed for winners and losers, but for everyone’s enjoyment.
I also taught them to jump rope using several flexible, long animal-gut ropes tied together. We tried marking off a court in the sand for learning hopscotch, but it was too dark and our bodies were demanding rest. We postponed that treat for another time.
That night I stretched out on my back and looked up at the incredible sparkling sky. Not even a display of diamonds on a jeweler’s black velvet showcase could be more impressive. My attention was drawn like a magnet to the brightest one. It seemed to open my mind in realizing that these people do not grow old like we do. True, their bodies wear out eventually, but it is more like a candle burning down slowly and evenly. They don’t have one organ giving out at age twenty and another at forty. What we call stress in the United States seemed a cop-out now.
My body was finally cooling off. Lots of sweat was going into this learning, but it was indeed powerful instruction. How could I share with my society what I was witnessing here? People would never believe me. I had to be ready for that. People would find this way of life hard to believe. But somehow, I knew that the importance of healing physical health must be coupled with the real healing of humans, the healing of their wounded, bleeding, diseased, and injured eternal beingness.
I stared at the sky, asking myself, “How?”
21
OUT IN FRONT
THE SUN popped up, and with it came instant thermal heat. That morning the daily rituals were special. I was placed in the center position of our semicircle facing east. Ooota told me to acknowledge Divine Oneness in my own way and send out my prayer for the goodness of the day. At the conclusion of the ceremony, while we prepared to walk, I was told it was my turn to lead. I was to walk in front and lead the tribe. “But I can’t,” I said. “I don’t know where we are going or how to find anything. I really appreciate the offer, but I just can’t lead.”
“You should,” I heard. “It is time. In order to know your home, the earth, all its levels of life, and your relationship to everything seen and unseen, you must lead. It is fine to walk for a while as the last one in any group, and it is acceptable to spend time mingling in the middle, but ultimately everyone must at some time lead. You have no way of understanding leadership roles until you assume that responsibility. Everyone must experience all of these roles at some time, without exception, sooner or later, if not in this lifetime, sometime! The only way to pass any test is to take the test. All tests on every level are always repeated one way or another until you pass.”
So we began to walk with me assuming the lead position. It was a very hot day. The temperature seemed higher than 105 degrees. At midday we stopped and used our nightly sleeping material to make shade. After the peak of the heat was over, we walked again, long past our usual time for making camp. No plants or animals appeared along our route to be honored as our meal. We found no water. The air remained a hot, motionless vacuum. Finally I gave up and called the day’s journey to a halt.
That night I asked for help. We had no food, no water. I asked Ooota, but he ignored me. I asked others, knowing they could not understand my language, but knowing they could understand what my heart was saying. I said, “Help me, Help us!” I repeated it over and over, but no one responded.
Instead they talked about how every person at some time walks in the rear. I began to wonder if perhaps our street people and the homeless in the United States are allowing themselves to remain victims. Certainly mingling in the center is the position most Americans seem to lean toward. Not too rich, nor too poor. Not deathly ill, but never quite healthy. Not morally pure, but somewhere short of serious crime. And sooner or later we must step out in faith. We must lead, if only to become responsible for ourselves.
I fell asleep licking my cracked lips with a numb, dry, parched tongue. It was difficult to tell if my light-headedness was from hunger, thirst, heat, or exhaustion.
We walked a second day under my leadership. Again the heat was severe. By now my throat was closing; it was becoming impossible for me to swallow. My tongue was so dry it was almost stiff, and it felt swollen several times the original size, a dry sponge between my teeth. Breathing was difficult. As I tried to force the hot air down further into my chest, I began to appreciate how these people had described the blessing they received sharing the nasal shape of the koala bear. Their broad expansive nose and large nasal passages were more adept at dealing with the soaring air temperature than my European pug nose.
The barren horizon grew more and more hostile. It seemed to defy humanity, to belong to something other than humans. The land had won all battles against progress, and now it seemed to regard life as alien. There were no roads, no airplanes overhead, not even the tracks of creatures could be seen.
I knew if the tribe did not help me soon, we would all certainly die. Our pace was slow, each step painfully forced. In the distance we could see a dark, heavily laden rain cloud. It tortured us by staying just far enough ahead so we could not walk fast enough and far enough to receive the bountiful gift it held. We could not even get close enough to share the benefit of the shadow. We could only see it in the distance and know that life-giving water was riding out in front of us like a carrot dangled before a donkey.
At one point I shouted. Perhaps to prove to myself I could, perhaps merely in desperation. But it was of no avail. The world merely swallowed up the sound like a ravished monster.
Cool water lay in wet pool mirages before my eyes, but when I arrived at the place in the sand, it was always only sand.
The second day passed without food, water, or help. That night I was too exhausted, ill, and discouraged to use even the pillow of hide; I think I passed out instead of going to sleep.
On the third morning I went to every individual in the group, and on my knees I begged as loudly as my dying body would permit, “Please help me. Please save us.” It was very difficult to speak because I had awakened with my tongue so dry it was stuck fast to the inside of my cheek.
They listened and looked at me intently but only stood there smiling. I had the impression they were thinking, “We are hungry and thirsty too, but this is your experience, so we support you totally in what you must learn.” N
o one offered any help.
We walked and walked. The air was still, the world totally inhospitable. It seemed to represent defiance against my intrusion. There was no help, no way out. My body was numb from the heat and had become unresponsive. I was dying. These were the signs of fatal dehydration. This was it. I was dying.
My thoughts jumped from subject to subject. I recalled my youth. Dad worked so hard all the time for the Santa Fe Railway. He was so handsome. There was never a time in my entire life he wasn’t available to give love, support, and encouragement. Mom was always home for us. I remembered her feeding the hobos who knew magically, out of all the houses in town, the one where they were never refused. My sister was a straight-A student, so pretty and popular that I could watch her for hours dressing for a date. When I grew up I wanted to be just like my sister. In my mind I could picture my little brother, hugging our family dog and complaining about the girls at school wanting to hold his hand. As children, the three of us were very good friends. We would have stood by each other regardless of any circumstance. But over the years we had drifted apart. That day, I knew they would not even sense my desperation. I have read that when you are dying, your life flashes before you. My life wasn’t exactly going through my brain like a video, but I was grasping at the strangest memories. I could picture myself standing in the kitchen drying dishes and studying spelling words. The most difficult word I ever wrestled with was air-conditioning. I could picture my falling in love with a sailor, and our church wedding, the miracle of birth, first my baby boy, and second, having my daughter born at home. I remembered all my jobs, schooling, degrees, education, then realized here I was dying in the Australian desert. What was it all about? Had I accomplished what my life was intended for? “Dear God,” I said to myself. “Help me understand what is happening.”
Instantly the answer came to me.
I had traveled over ten thousand miles from my American hometown, but I had not budged one inch in my thinking. I came from a left-brain world. I was raised on logic, judgment, reading, writing, math, cause and effect; here, I was in a right-brain reality, with people who used none of my so-called important educational concepts and civilized necessities. They were masters of the right brain, using creativity, imagination, intuition, and spiritual concepts. They didn’t find it necessary to verbalize their communications; it was done through thought, prayer, meditation, whatever you might call it. I had begged and pleaded for help vocally. How ignorant I must have appeared to them. Any Real Person would have asked silently, mind to mind, heart to heart, individual to the universal consciousness that links all life together. I had up until that moment considered myself different, separate, apart from the Real People. They kept saying we are all One, and they live in nature as One, but until then I had been the observer. I had been keeping myself apart. I had to become One with them, with the universe, and communicate as the Real People did. So I did. Mentally I said “Thank you” to the source of this revelation, and in my mind I cried out, “Help me. Please, help me.” I used the words I heard the tribe say each morning, “If it is in my highest good and the highest good for all of life everywhere, let me learn.”
The thought came into my mind. “Put the rock in your mouth.” I looked around. There were no rocks. We were walking on fine hour-glass sand. It came again. “Put the rock in your mouth.” Then I remembered the rock I had chosen and still held in the cleavage of my chest. It had been there for months. I had forgotten it. I took it out and put it in my mouth, wallowed it around, and miraculously, moisture began to form. I could feel the ability to swallow being restored. There was hope. Perhaps I was not meant to die today.
“Thank you, Thank you, Thank you,” I said in silence. I would have cried, but my body did not have enough moisture left for tears. So I continued mentally asking for help: “I can learn. I will do whatever is needed. Just help me find water. I don’t know what to do, what to look for, where to walk.”
The thought came to me: “Be water. Be water. When you can be water, you will find water.” I didn’t know what it meant. It didn’t make sense. Be water! That isn’t possible. But again I concentrated on forgetting my left-brain society programing. I shut out logic; I shut out reason. I opened myself up to intuition, and closing my eyes, I began being water. As I walked, I used all my senses. I could smell water, taste it, feel it, hear it, see it. I was cold, blue, clear, muddy, still, rippling, ice, melting, vapor, steam, rain, snow, wet, nourishing, splashing, expanding, unlimited. I was every possible image of water that came to mind.
We walked across a flat plain, level as far as the eye could see. There was only one small tawny mound in sight, a sand dune about six feet high with a rock ledge on top. It appeared misplaced in the bleak landscape. I walked up the side of it, my eyes half-closed in the blazing light, almost in a mental trance, and sat on the rock. I looked down, and there in front of me, all of my supportive, unconditionally-loving friends had stopped and were looking up with grins that spread across their faces from ear to ear. I faintly returned the smile. Then I stretched back my left hand to steady myself and felt something wet. My head jerked around. There behind me, in the continuation of the rock ledge I was perched on, was a rock pool about ten feet in diameter and about eighteen inches deep, filled with beautiful, crystal clear water from yesterday’s taunting rain cloud.
I truly believe I was closer to our Creator with that first sip of tepid water than with any taste of communion I have ever received in a church.
Without a watch, I cannot be certain about the time, but I would estimate it took no more than thirty minutes from the time I started being water until we were putting our whole heads into the pool and shouting with joy.
While we were still celebrating our success, a giant reptile came walking by. It was enormous, something that looked like it was left over from prehistoric times. It was no illusion, but very real. Nothing could have been more appropriate to appear for dinner than this science-fiction-looking creature. The meat brought the euphoria that overwhelms people at feasts.
That night I understood for the first time the tribe’s belief in the relationship of the land to characteristics of one’s ancestors. Our giant, rocky cup seemed to burst through the flat surroundings and could easily be a nourishing breast of some past relative, her body consciousness now put into inorganic matter to save our lives. I privately christened the mound—Georgia Catherine, my mother’s name.
I looked upward into the vast expanse of world surrounding us and, giving thanks, finally understood that the world is truly a place of abundance. It is full of kind, supporting people to share our lives if we let them. There is food and water for all beings everywhere if we are open to receiving and open to giving. But most of all I now appreciated the abundant spiritual guidance available in my life. Help was available in every stress, including a brush with death and the very act of dying, now that I had gotten past “doing it my way.”
22
MY OATH
THERE WAS no differentiation in days of the week while living with the tribe. Nor was there any way of knowing in which month we were living. It was apparent that time was not an issue. One day I had the strangest feeling it was Christmas. Why, I’m not sure. There was nothing even remotely suggestive of a decorated pine tree or a crystal decanter of eggnog nearby. But, it probably was December 25. That made me think about days of the week and an incident that had happened in my office a few years prior.
In the waiting room were two Christian ministers who began discussing religion. The conversation seemed to ignite as they forcefully argued whether the true Sabbath, according to the Bible, was on Saturday or Sunday. Here in the Outback, my memory of the episode seemed comical. It was already the day after Christmas in New Zealand, and at this instant it was Christmas Eve in the United States. I could picture the crooked red line I had seen drawn through the blue ocean in the world atlas. Time, it stated, started and stopped here. At an invisible boundary on a constantly moving sea, every new day o
f the week had its birth.
I also remembered, as a St. Agnes High School student, sitting one Friday night on a stool at Allen’s Drive-in. We had whopper burgers before us and waited for the clock to strike midnight. One bite of meat taken on Friday meant instant mortal sin and eternal damnation. Years later the rule was changed, but nobody ever answered my inquiry into what happened to the poor damned souls already convicted. Now it all seemed so stupid.
I could think of no greater way to honor the purpose of Christmas than the way the Real People tribe live their lives. They celebrate no holidays in our yearly manner. They do honor each tribe member sometime throughout the year, not on a specific birthday, but rather to acknowledge the person’s talent, contribution to the community, personal spiritual growth. They do not celebrate getting older; what they do celebrate is becoming better.
One woman told me her name and talent in life meant Time Keeper. They believe we are all multitalented and progress through a series of strengths. She was presently an artist of time and worked with another person who had the ability of detailed memory recall. When I asked her to explain further, she advised me the tribal members were going to seek guidance about that, and I would be told later if I was to have access to that knowledge or not.
There were about three nights when the conversation was not interpreted for me. I knew without asking that the discussion centered on the question of whether or not to include me in some special information. I also knew it was not just me they were considering, but the fact that I represented all Mutants everywhere. It became apparent to me that the Elder was also doing a real sales pitch in my behalf on those three nights. I had the feeling Ooota was the one most opposed. I realized I had been chosen to have a unique experience no outsider had been allowed to have before. Perhaps the knowledge of timekeeping was asking too much.