— Welcome to our library with the compass to navigate her across time and place. We’re learning to be time and world travelers without necessarily leaving the home and land we are in. What does it mean to steward an archive that lives online, in the relationships between us and elders, wisdom keepers, custodians of knowledge, and the territories and lands that inform them? In this month’s class we will explore these questions.

— What does it mean to work with the ceremony of research, learning and story, so that it offers us something more than surface level narrative, more information to consume and discard, and moves us into right alignment and action in the world? This is about developing a process of integrity, responsibility and accountability to work with knowledge that supports the whole.

“The purpose of any ceremony is to build stronger relationships or bridge the distance between aspects of our cosmos and ourselves. The research that we do as Indigenous people is a ceremony that allows us a raised level of consciousness and insight into our world. Let us go forward together with open minds and good hearts as we further take part in this ceremony.’

— Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Shawn Wilson

— The last living libraries in the world currently exist in the form of elders - when one dies before passing their knowledge on to their future generations, vast libraries of knowledge is lost with them. We are in a crucial moment in history where many of us have been cut off from these traditions, with younger generations bridging the gap and learning to steward knowledge again with the level of responsibility, integrity and complexity their elders before them have held. We each have a role to play as custodian, facilitator, storyteller, supporter and/or bridge. How can we prepare to step into this role and tend to the portals of wisdom that can guide us all to a better future?

— We developed language and then writing which shifted our emphasis from the right expansive awareness of the world to the left focused and more linear side of the brain over time, in a way that allows us to feel in control. By rooting back into a relationship with the land with practices such as dreaming, ceremony of story and yarning (story weaving) we can start to re-engage both hemispheres in the brain to function better together and increase our capacity, while remaining in right relationship to Natural Law.

‘So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the world: it shapes, rather than grounds, our thinking.’

— Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

— Into the wild we go. Where are you? What and who are part of your web of relations? What is the wind singing and the rivers shaping as narrative? What do mountain peaks call out and how to deserts and oceans move us into rest and movement simultaneously?

‘The bogs, rivers, mountains, and shorelines are more than preservers of old myths, bones, and memories. They are energy banks and time sponges, and what is held within them seeks release.’

— Manchán Magan, Listen to the Land Speak: A Journey into the Wisdom of What Lies Beneath Us

— The technology of Aboriginal Songlines can allow for the recall of 100s of birds, 100s of insects, 100s of plants, unbelievable memory of distances for travel, land management advice, genealogies, astronomy, legal systems and ethical expectations all within a path that can be sung to, awakened with stories, ceremonies and rituals by initiated knowledge-keepers. The technology of Songlines can be found in some form all across the world and gives those with the understanding of that technology a different interpretation of archeological sites such as Stonehenge standing stones in England, cave art across Europe, and ritual objects with carvings, lines and figurines inscribed. Each can be understood not just as primitive remnants of the past but potentially complex portals of information archived into art, land and structural form.

— Alongside, Songlines and sacred places on the Earth that can invoke memory, inspire dreaming and call upon ancient knowledge, there are sacred objects and artworks that work as cultural memory tools also such as the Lukasa from West African Luba people. Like Songlines, these memory boards are miniature landscapes; the pathways through them are ways to remember vast and complex understanding. Ritual objects work by our relationship to them, and like all relationships can be nurtured or lost over time. What can we make this month to support our journey and role as custodian?

— A spiritual worldview invites us to stay connected to who we are, where we come from, and look to where we can go next while weaving in a Web of Relations.

This takes us beyond the hubris of the western scientism mindset, where everything is developed by individual and human-led genius, and that our collective intelligence is increasing as we learn more than our ancestors before us.

Within this paradigm, knowledge is thought to be categorized and fit within neat boxes of: right or wrong, provable or falsified/fake, defined or fantasy, and in integrity or quackery/ delusional.

Looking towards a more spiritual worldview can mean respecting the web of relationships that make us who we are, while acknowledging that the wisdom and intelligence of our ancestors may be greater than ours. We develop responsibilities and protocols to honor these relationships, and ways of receiving knowledge, to learn and live well.

— As we incorporate dreams more so into our lives, dreams can become part of an understanding that there are many ways to receive and know information beyond just cognitive processing and receiving information from sources such as books, media, teachers and peers.

Dreams have held significance for most of our ancestors, and for indigenous communities today, dreams are still incorporated into their Ways of Knowing.

To respect dreams as part of a research and learning process is to respect indigenous methodologies and a sacred worldview, and to also respect most of our own ancestral history.

This incorporates the understanding that we can receive wisdom and knowledge from territories, animals, plants, waterways, spirits and ancestors. This knowledge can be transmitted through the medium of dreams, and can hold significance, not just for ourselves but for our communities.