De-coding connection

There’s never been a moment in time when we have been so place-based and yet so connected globally … when I think of this moment of crisis, I look around the world and the leaders that I want to hear from are not the ones that I hear from on the television… there’s no one that I would rather be listening to and learning from at this point in time than our walking together, elder and leadership group.

Katie Stubley

Katie is introducing four Aboriginal Nyungar Leaders from southwestern, West Australia and the grace, humility and generosity of all of these people takes my breath away.

Richard Walley—one of these leaders—connects past and present potentials, in these times of coronavirus remoteness, and gifts us all with insight, including into our inner cores. Read below or watch >

Richard: Good to talk to you from our country and we’re blessed to be able to communicate in a universal language which is nature.

The isolation story has been a wonderful one for us as a people because we’ve been isolated here in this country for thousands of years and the longer you’re Isolated the more you get to balance within yourself.

I think that’s very important, that isolation, because it gets back to the inner core of who you are and what your connections are… As a people, even though we’ve been isolated we’ve been connected so that that opposites are very much alive in our culture.

Connected

We’re connected under the one sun, in our culture we call the Sun the giver of life, which is also the name of our mother. We also know that, in our culture, it’s a feminine energy. And so is earth, we call that boodja. The boodja is the land the one land, one earth, which is our mother.

Then we have the ocean. The ocean connects, is one water all the way into and under every ocean. This land, all the waters, the rivers, the lakes are all connected to one, one source. So we’re connected by one Sun, one Land, one Water since this planet existed.

One of the things we’ve always found is that the last comers, regardless of who they are and where they’re from, were always the most destructive because they don’t understand the balance of what’s already there. It takes them a while to understand that balance. That balance is put in a series of what we call codes—or you’d call code—we call boodja or totems.

Codes

Those codes, you learn them step by step and as you decipher those codes they become your guide for the rest your life—the code that links us to place, plant, animal is our total system. We can relay that to people who live in other countries so that it connects us. …

What’s been happening for thousands of years is that we’ve defined a number of codes and we live by those codes. Those codes are not only us, as people, plants, animals. They’re also how we interact, how we keep our ceremony and how we keep a balance.

Those codes were kept in our mind and now in our heads and they were given in such a way that you hold them for the rest of your life. Where the Western mind failed is that they could not decipher these codes because we didn’t write them down, we didn’t have the text, we didn’t have the scribes, we didn’t have those images through which archeologists and anthropologists can actually decipher and understand what people are saying. …

De-coding

That’s a challenge of looking at these codes. The Western mind understands codes because the alphabet is the code. You learn these numbers, words, letters then that’s a code for you to do millions of communications.

The number system one, two, zero is a code and you learn those code systems and that takes you then into the communication world and counting world. But, a lot of them and a lot of people don’t understand the emotional codes—the logic codes that link you to place, plant, animal. …

By linking them to science the Western mind can then comprehend it and also give it some credibility. To us it’s always there, there’s always this past-present-future in our culture where we have the past in the present—the past sets a foundation to who we are, where we’re from. The present is our responsibility to take that past, hone that past and also enhance it so we pass that on. But we are doing this in the moment, doing it in the now. …

Deciphering six seasons

I want to leave you knowing that we have a series of codes. One of those codes is six seasons. The six seasons are quite simple to decipher—from winter it goes to spring. In winter everything is fertile and then in spring it goes to birth. In our culture we have fertility and then incubation—before you can have birth from fertility you have to have incubation. That’s the pregnancy time, the budding time from winter to spring. It’s a season. When the summer comes, the start of summer is quite warm but then you have a hot period, that’s another season. So they’re just a number like the codes …

Connecting

That’s the challenge we have and that’s an opportunity we have with platforms like these ones to speak about these codes to get the credibility that they deserve. [To look at it another way,] we need some sayings from ancient peoples. We have lots of sayings from very famous people and people from different parts of the world yet very rarely do you hear a Noongar quotation.

These Aboriginal quotations that have been around for thousands of years that’s where our challenge is now is to get some of these quotations into the minds so that they can actually then manifest in the minds to get some outcomes and actions.

I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to communicate—we know there are two things in life you can’t control or buy: one of them is the emotions that are owned by the individuals and stimulated by other individuals and the other one is time. So thank you for emotion, thank you for your time—may the good spirit keep you safe.