12.02.07
A White Girl’s Spirit-World: Surviving a Semester in Australia by Susan Rakowski
The lure of Aboriginal spirituality was too strong to resist during the semester I lived in Australia. My religiously-tired, raised-Catholic heart clung to this dizzy new world of reverence for nature, of vision beyond mind. I learned all I could in the seminars and museum visits and weekend trips that my study-abroad program had organized. Rational and scientific, I didn’t necessarily believe that the spirits of Rainbow Serpents and mystical Wallaby Dreamings actually roamed Australia, but I soaked up the stories that both our white and Aboriginal lecturers told, and I hungered to finally leave the strip-mall cities of the coast and head into the desert, hoping to absorb whatever power was held in that sacred dust. I wanted to know the genesis of the Aboriginal people’s kinship with the spirits of their land and ancestors–a kinship that I had never before considered as anything other than primitive superstition; a kinship that I suddenly yearned to have myself. But I may have jumped in too quickly, grasping for more than I was ready to cope with.
When my study-abroad program officially ended, I hired a quietly cheerful paleoanthropologist to be my guide for two weeks and take me to the Simpson desert of southwest Queensland, where he regularly engaged in field research. The evening before we left for the desert, he reverently showed me some artifacts he had collected on his last trip to the bush. I lifted a smooth green axe-head, a relic from the ancient times, picked up near the Warburton River. I held the stone against my cheek and suddenly shivered at its coolness, quickly returning it to the table.
That night I had a nightmare, more real than any I had ever had. I dreamt that the green axe-head was cursed and a demon within it was taking over me, my mind, and my sanity. Hyperventilating, I shot awake, feeling like I was choking, dying, flying away from myself like a tiny sparrow caught in a tornado. I was wide awake but the terror of the dream was growing stronger–worming its way deeper into my waking mind. As a child, I’d had the occasional nightmare that lingered well past the moment my eyes opened, but I had never experienced such an inescapable dread and powerlessness as I did this night. The image of that green axe-head from the desert appeared in my mind’s eye, and a warning from an Aboriginal elder I met a few months earlier flashed through my panicked mind: she had told me to never move old rocks and stones and personal things from where I found them, because they might have a spell on them. I didn’t believe in spells, in ghosts, in demons . . . but as that old saying about the devil went: they sure seemed to believe in me at that moment.
If becoming so intrigued by Aboriginal spirituality meant that ancient demons trapped in desert stones were going to attack me in my dreams, then I did not want to take on the responsibilities that came with this awareness. If it was a choice between this bewildering ghost-world and the safe oblivion of the cold, dry, empty faith that I was used to–I would take the safe way tonight, anything to stop the tears that were by now flowing freely down my cheeks.
I remembered something I had read at the airport upon entering Australia, in the book Dreamkeepers, by Harvey Arden: a warning against even skirting the edges of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, because you might fall in. As I lay in bed, fighting against the presence that still clawed at my consciousness, I instantly understood that I hadn’t yet fallen into anything–I was still skirting and flirting, a naïve child on the edge of an abyss. Lying there, my eyes squeezed tight against the night, I began to comprehend that this overwhelming experience wasn’t necessarily caused by a cursed piece of stone. It was more like a test I was giving myself–a threshold of belief that I had come to . . . and I knew I couldn’t (didn’t have the courage to?) cross that threshold and take on the responsibilities of Aboriginal law at that point in my life. Those weren’t my spirits. They weren’t my history. “Get your own Dreamtime!” I heard voices screaming at me, shouting over and over and over again, words from the Dreamkeepers book. Get your own Dreamtime. I closed the door.
I made a deal, for my sanity. I closed the door to the Aboriginal Dreaming. Then and there, in the grip of deepest fear, I vowed to have nothing more to do with the realm of Aboriginal beliefs. I told “them” that I would be going into the desert the next day as a white tourist, and that was all. I would not go in with the intent of calling forth Aboriginal spirits and trudging through their sacred places as though I had even the slightest comprehension of what they really were. I won’t go in, I won’t go in, I won’t go in, I silently cried. I’m just a stupid white tourist. A stupid white tourist. When the light of dawn finally shone through the windows of my hotel room, I could sleep at last. I knew I was sane. I was safe.
Safe, but heartbroken. I thought I had given up Aboriginal spirituality, which at the time seemed to me the same as giving up any sort of spirituality at all. I had proven too frightened to accept true change in my world. Two weeks later, after an enjoyable, uneventful trip through the desert with my guide, I relaxed on a hammock under a coconut tree in Fiji, a quick stopover before heading back to America, to return to the much more normal world of my college campus. Writing feverishly in my travel journal, a safe distance away from the beguiling red earth of Australia, I finally came to understand that I had only given up the Aboriginal worldview–their particular perception of spirits and law. I hadn’t given up the possibility of finding my true spiritual home. I was a white tourist. But white tourists could find their own beliefs–be it in the desert, or anywhere else.
As I swung gently below the tree, I noticed that I hadn’t really lost anything. I just had to look in a different direction. And that was where I now felt deadlocked: in which direction should I go? Certainly not back to the organized, illogical, patriarchal religions I was most familiar with. What else was there? I was worried that I had placed myself on the outside of the circle of spiritual understanding, far from the center, and now I was blindly seeking a new way back to that center.
I closed my eyes and leaned against the braided ropes that suspended me in the air, my hands dropping off the hammock and sifting aimlessly through the sand. The smoothness of the white grains calmed me as I let the sand pour through my open fingers. I breathed in the sharp scent of my suntan lotion, and the musty breeze that wafted in from the forested interior of the tiny island. Taking a moment to just relax and stop thinking always allowed me to see things more clearly.
I discerned that more than one circle of life and beliefs existed, and somehow they all had the same center, if that made any sense. Life was more like a sphere, I decided–not a flat, two-dimensional circle. I opened my eyes and grabbed my pencil again, hastily sketching a spherical, atom-like structure in my notebook. It was made up of infinite circles, all centered around the same internal point–the Source of everything. Actually, I thought, they’re not technically circles–they’re spirals; they all spiral in to the center; some spiral straight into it really fast, but some are really wide spirals, and they seem to just keep circling and circling, never getting closer, but they do–ultimately, everything gets back to the center, and then it can spiral right back out again; and we can jump back and forth between different circles and spirals. There’s no beginning or end, no right or wrong path; it’s all just a hodge-podge, an experimentation, a game to see what we like best in this strangely glorious existence. . .
I smiled, satisfied with this image; it meant that I could still go into the center of the sphere whenever I was ready; if I didn’t like the route I was currently on, I just had to pick a different path–find a new circle on which to travel. And even if I wasn’t in the center of it all yet, I was still an integral part of the sphere. In fact, the outside was what defined everything. The center was nothing without it.
I saw in my head an image from my kung fu classes–a multitude of people moving together in a ring, leaping and gliding like animals, immersed in the dance-like rhythm of the art. Two students at a time would slip into the middle of the circle and move together: not exactly fighting; more like feeling one another’s energy and trying to meld together into one continuous swirl of give and take; bodies striking, rolling, twisting, evading. We love to watch those who are in the center, I thought. They seem so beautiful and graceful and powerful, moving with a fluidity and wisdom that we think we can only dream of achieving. So we hold back, and stay where we are: watching, learning. But as we move along the rim of the circle, dancing to the electrifying beat of the drummers, we are growing less afraid and becoming just as strong and beautiful and powerful as those in the center.
We too can fly. And we will make our way to the center in our own time, whenever we decide to. For we each have something to give, to share. We are each an inspiration to someone else, and they are waiting for us to gather our courage and crawl into the heart of the circle, where we belong. And once we’ve spent some time in the center, we always return to the outside of the circle, where we came from–where we live. But we bring the center with us.
And so I understood that as long as I didn’t let the fear from my first aborted attempt keep me back, I would eventually find the path that would lead me to my own patiently waiting spirit.
Comment from MPJ: Beautiful analogy about the spiral. Read it carefully.