In the ancient sing-song clicking language of the first people of Africa, in the last remaining bands of “wild” women, children and men, stories once remained alive of a time in which all life was sacred and in balance.
They had stories about the creation of the world that occurred in the time before time, with songs about how the earth flung out from itself the sun and the moon, and of how the stars were hung that today that can still be heard to whisper to a listening man. They had songs about the first humans to wake up from the dream time of the animal men we had been before, together with songs about the seasons and about the earliest people who first learned how to read them, and songs about the animals who gave up their lives for the sustenance of the first people, with other songs about the animals who forgot how to talk, or of animals who brought the gift of fire from the animal gods.
But then in the same ways that strange men in their strange clothes came with their loud, fierce guns and suddenly hunted out all the wild; strange things called fences suddenly appeared, and the land that had previously belonged to none and simultaneously to all, became marked with deadly new lines that could not be crossed.
The children of the first people asked their elders why, and could not be given a satisfactory answer, for the first people have always possessed nothing and yet everything and so they knew nothing useful to teach their young about observing boundaries that had been installed by people who claimed to own what everyone knows and can readily see, can never be owned, but should simply be walked on with humility, and with profound and sacred respect.
The lives and livelihoods of the first people were taken from them.
The animals they had revered and humbly lived amongst for millennia beyond counting, were taken from them. The strange men with their clothes and guns and fences came with big machines and wondrous illuminated buildings and ripped open the earth and took away not only the animals but also all the plant life, both noble and rude, and after that, then they poisoned the life-giving water so that even the rains stopped coming in their times.
The freedom of the first people and their sacred, seasonal bonds with the earth that had always nourished them, was taken from them.
But it wasn’t only from them that life was stolen.
Our freedom, our sacred human connections to the cosmos, and the future of all life on the planet was also taken from us when we taught ourselves to prize the metals inside of the earth more than we prized the earth itself, or even less, the lives of the others who had always walked humbly on it.
We became a dumb creature without true understanding of our position in reality, now stripped of our ancient common history written in fire and blood and bone.
We evolved ourselves into a beast completely out of balance with its immediate world.
We lost our way.
But the cosmos will not rest in this state.
The sacred gods of truth and of forever, the gods of the first peoples and of the dream time before them, have not been displaced nor have they been cast out of existence by the civilising of ourselves, nor will they will be appeased by our riches or by the sacrifices we made to our modern man-made gods of economy and industry, sacrifices shaped in the dying lives of those beautiful, precious and humble first people who we drove off and sacrificed for the comforts and luxuries the new gods would promise but never bring.
And while those humble, naive, pure and innocent souls were easy to displace and almost too easy to destroy, their gods are not the same. Our gods are not the same. Our modern gods are fleeting and transitory, and their worth and power is determined by the finite resources their worship claim, but the gods of the first people are immutable and unwavering and they have always and will always remain and one day they will bring us back to the balanced ways in which life, consciousness and the cosmos is supposed to behave.
It is just a matter of time now.
How many moons, no one can say, for we have killed off the last remaining people who knew properly how to commune and converse with the forever gods of tomorrow and yesterday, their/our gods who commune freely with the humble souls of a gentle people they love dearly as their own.
It is clear to any man beast with its eyes nicely open that we have lost our way. To the others, know this…
…there is coming a day…
