Love and sorrow connect you to Country. They help make Country part of you and if you listen to that you will learn about limits too. We all need to listen to Country so we are not blinded by our own desires. It is time to stop and listen, to learn about the land and what nature is saying.
There are many of us breathing the same air. The clouds are above us all, with their messages and their Rom [Yolŋu Law]. You don’t need to look somewhere else for answers, to go away and explore or build a new house or make a fortune. Life itself is important.
We need to tell those who are blinded by their own desires. It’s something we don’t want to hide. We want to tell the truth to the greedy people about climate change, building, building, never replanting, digging, killing. If it’s something we don’t want to tell the ŋäpaki [non-Indigenous people], then who are we going to tell, the spirits? Many don’t want to listen to us. But perhaps you can listen. Remember the limits. Those clouds are separating here, with us, with you.
It is about learning from the land, listening to the stillness, learning from the clouds as they separate …
(Gay’wu Group of Women, Songspirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country Through Songlines, Allen & Unwin: Crows Nest, 2019, p. 111)
very true...the real wisdom is that of the earth and sky. and she points out how important a sense of contentment, of enough-ness, is to being wise. if we constantly look to acquisition and novelty for meaning and comfort, we are deaf to all true wisdom (including our own) and act badly, ignorantly, destructively. we lose the sense of wise spaciousness in the land, the clouds, the stillness...
ReplyDeleteThere's so much wisdom in that book. It wasn't an easy read, but it was a privilege to have access to some of the songlines of Yolnu culture, and to be given insight into their way of life. Western life is culturally, socially and spiritually impoverished in comparison.
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