Boab tree in Kimberley region, Western Australia. Photo ©Claudia Jocher 2020
Frogs croaked in puddles outside their small metal house. ‘They sound like they’re saying ‘Greg, greg, greg,’’ said Mari.
Nerida and Mari were in northwestern Australia, a dramatic landscape of sinuous rivers, grassy plains and towering red cliffs, buttes and mesas. Most days, Mari went out to photograph the animals and the country, watching for the light to change, or talking softly to an eagle or a kangaroo to coax them into her composition.
Nerida worked as a doctor at community clinics. Days were long, full of people with complicated problems. Her wife sustained her, preparing food and keeping the house: sweeping and washing the dust from the floors as it blew in under the doors and through cracks around the windows. Now the dust had turned to mud on Nerida’s boots.
It was Monday night, May 25, 2020. Nerida came in from work through the laundry door. Peeling off her clinic clothes, she stepped under the shower, scrubbing her skin, her watch, her earrings. She washed her hair every day now. Afterwards, she put the towel and bathmat in the machine with her scrubs and started the hottest wash. Only then did she come in fresh clothes to embrace her wife. That was their routine in the time of Coronavirus.
On work evenings Nerida was often too tired to listen or to talk. But when Mari said she would channel, Nerida knew her energy would be restored. She would be inspired. But she was apprehensive. Because she was going to ask more about Coronavirus and the spirits had no regard for her scientific knowledge or medical training.
It took five or ten minutes for her wife to settle into a trance state. Maybe the pain she’s had from walking and crouching and climbing makes it harder to leave her body, Nerida thought. Then she felt a rush of energy as Aedgar appeared in her wife’s relaxed body, sounding chipper. ‘Hello,’ he said.
Nerida grinned. ‘Hello.’
‘Oh,’ he said, seeming surprised. He took in where they were. ‘What can we do for you, my dear?’
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘You’re welcome. Wasn’t quite as easy as we wish it would be.’ He kept the eyes closed, she noticed. Mari’s eyes must be dry from her intense focus on her drawing and photography, Nerida thought. ‘Our friend is quite tired,’ she said.
‘Yes. It’s a bit difficult to get in. Something in the neck—‘ he gestured, ‘out of balance.’
Nerida appreciated that the Spirit did not look for mythical bodily perfection. ‘Thank you for coming, nevertheless.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘Our friend, Bartgrinn, told us earlier that children,’ Nerida began, ‘were not so susceptible to COVID-19 because of the mitochondria in their cells— that the virus could pretty much pass through them without affecting them.’
‘Well, it can affect some of them,’ Aedgar conceded. ‘But calling it passing through—‘ he moved the hands like a breeze and reflected a moment, ‘is a very good description. Sometimes in passing through, it gets stuck in some problem zones within that body. Otherwise, it does kind of pass through. And then pushes itself on to other people.’
Nerida scowled. She saw images in her mind of swollen, red, infected COVID toes and fearfully imagined contagion at schools.
‘These perfect little vessels—‘ Aedgar reflected happily. ‘Everybody likes to touch them.’
She felt the glow of a child’s touch. She often got hugs at her clinic. But not any more. She wore a mask and gown and had to practice physical distancing. Her mask frightened the babies.
‘Everybody loves to hug them,’ he said. She smiled tenderly.
He changed the mood: ‘We would say this is not advisable.’
Child in Argentina. Photo by Ed Libedinsky.
Nerida crossed her arms over her chest. Her forearms felt cool under her warm hands.
‘If you have your own group of germs,’ Aedgar said, ’and you live with that specific group—it’s kind of alright. You might call it a family. We can call it a group of germs.’
Nerida was a bit startled by his grotesque expression.
‘So you can stay within your germ group with not much happening. But that could change drastically if you make those little things expose you to other germ groups. If the children go outside and mingle with others, and come back, they pass the virus on.
‘The little ones won’t know. They’re fine. They don’t show it that much.
‘It affects them in a different way. Some of them have issues in their little bodies—it will attach to those spots. And then it can get rapidly worse: first a bit bad and then rapidly worse. And some of them won’t recover.’
‘Yes.’ Nerida’s shoulders tensed. ‘We’ve had reports from India and New York that a few children have died. And some children have been born with the virus.’
Aedgar inclined the head. ‘Yes. Some of them have it passed on through the mother. It depends on how long the mother was exposed to it.’
‘You could call it a conglomerate of viruses,’ he continued. ‘Like groups, clusters. It’s not a single one—there are a few with little tweaks, that have evolved in a different direction. It can be fatal quickly, depending on the combination of those.’
‘I see.’ Nerida’s anxiety rose.
‘Your peers are looking for a single one,’ he said. ‘They are related—it came from that same germ cluster family. But they have evolved in different directions. The base is still the same.’ He reached out Mari’s hands as if grasping for the right words, ‘But the ‘little hands’ that touch it to others on the outside go in different directions.’
‘Hmm. The receptors on the virus are changing?’
‘Yes.’
Image of Coronavirus showing receptors in green by Fusion Medical Animation.
Nerida shifted in her chair. She said, ‘That changes a lot of things. That changes the way it’s transmitted. It can change who is susceptible to it. It could change the effects of it.’
‘Yes. Yes. And depending on the host of it, the predispositions they have can determine how it turns up. If someone has kidney problems, it will make them a lot worse. They don’t get that cough. They don’t get the lung problems at all. It just attaches to the weak parts in your body. It can sit inside the body for quite a while, without being detected.
‘If you have a small load within a body you can’t detect it. You can only detect it once it’s replicated and changed a bit already.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes. Those are the ones they call the ‘silent spreaders’. They don’t have any issues. They have the so-called base model within them, which can be spread, of course. But due to the very low load of the virus within the body and the blood—in the things that can be tested—or on the mucous membranes, you might not get it.’
Nerida focussed on his words now, wanting to understand.
‘You know, you can put that test in and you could go next to it.’ He made a gesture that mimicked the precision and care Nerida used when taking a swab from the back of somebody’s nose or throat. She found that galling. This virus is a hideous enemy, she thought.
‘Because it could just be on the other side of the throat, or wherever. The test will show you it’s not there at all.’
He paused a moment, letting her take that in. She knew there was a high false-negative result rate with the nasopharyngeal swab test they used to test for the coronavirus. She felt a chill at the image of the virus nesting in the pharynx, millimetres away from the tip of her swab.
‘It’s got consciousness. We wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s hiding,’ Aedgar said. ‘But it’s a little bit like that. It’s keeping a low profile, as you would put it. It’s sitting there, waiting for a chance.’
Moon from California by Jack Taylor.
She changed the topic but was not more comfortable: ‘People are more concerned about the economy. At least, the ruling class is more concerned about the economy now than the sickness.’
Aedgar said, ‘They better be concerned. They better be. It’s gonna turn into a major problem, this economy. He paused a beat. ‘But the values of the majority of humankind turned into a wrong direction—‘
‘Yes.’
‘ —quite a while ago. Long time ago. You can’t continue like this. The planet will shake you off just like little parasites. People could have realised that—looking at Nature and the environment around you—you are not needed. Rather, you are—hmmm—tolerated.’
Superfluous was the word in Nerida’s mind. His words touched the grief she held for the planet and what people did to it.
‘So, you’re tolerated. You push it too far, you’ll get shaken off,’ he continued. ‘There will be a lot of combinations of natural events, we might call them, coming up.’
Through tight lips, she agreed. He makes ‘combinations’ of disasters sound almost poetic, she thought. She found it hard to relate to his objectivity about the suffering of thousands.
He went on. ‘And it will be a combination because humankind needs a lot more than these little viruses to see what they have done, to be able to change the way they think.’
Nerida felt apprehensive. Not a religious person, she was irritated by the idea of god’s justice. She had some room in her mind for natural justice, but she resisted the feeling that he was right. It’s not about punishment, she reminded herself. It’s about learning and balance.
‘You have to adapt,’ he said gently.
‘Yes.’
‘Humankind has to try to adapt to a new way of living—‘
She felt hope rising. ‘Mhmm?’
‘—which is an old way.’
‘Yes.’ Her Aboriginal spirit was at ease with the idea.
‘We can put it like that.’
‘Yes.’ She sighed softly.
‘It won’t go back to the caveman.’
‘Uhuh.’
‘But it’s a different way. Accepting Nature and not trying to mould Nature. Stop trying to push it into that mould, you know? Because you are just tolerated. You’re not the master of Nature, or this planet, or the Universe. You’re not. This needs to be understood.’
The frogs stopped croaking outside. The wind rattled the metal walls of their hut. ‘There’s a big storm heading to this part of the island,’ she said.
‘Yes, we can feel the ions. It will do quite a bit of damage,’ Aedgar agreed.
‘It’s done a lot of damage already, where it’s been—‘ She’d seen it on the weather reports.
‘Yes.’
‘—in India and Bangladesh.’
‘That’s a different one,’ he corrected.
‘I beg your pardon.’ She respected his authority on questions of global weather.
‘It’s different. Well, they are related. It’s a kind of teamwork, you might call it.’
‘Okay. Between the storms?’
Aedgar nodded. ‘They’ve originated in the same part of the ocean.’
‘Uhuh. Do storms have consciousness?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me what their consciousness is like?’
Twin storms, a typhoon and a super-typhoon over Luzon, Philippines, 2009. NASA photograph.
‘Usually, this consciousness would be focused on moving rain into an area where it is needed. But humankind has done a lot of damage to the planet. So now, it’s a bit like: ‘Where do we go first? There’s rain needed in all these areas.’ It’s as if the storm feels: ‘Maybe we get a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger.’ But then, sometimes their measure is not quite right.
‘You have changed the magnetic field of this planet already.’
‘Humans have?’ Nerida felt sick in her stomach.
‘Yes. That’s part of what’s going on. The path of ions in the storm—the way the ions move and where they’re supposed to go—it’s changed. How do we put it?’ He made a little sigh. ‘You used to have these storms and winds generated over the equator?’
‘Yes.’
‘They went in a rhythm all the way around the planet. There was a rhythm to it.’
Nerida knew the magnificent Southeast Asian Monsoon. She’d seen it in different places in her travels. Rain built from clouds against the walls of the Himalaya, flooding the valleys, replenishing rivers and revitalising the steaming plains: in northern Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, then to Bangladesh and Myanmar. Sweeping across the ocean to Malaysia and Indonesia, it filled the rice paddies with pounding icy water, bent and lifted leaves in the mountain jungles, knocked coconuts down as it bent the palms. ‘Yes,’ she said.
He said, ‘Tampering with the magnetic field has interrupted that rhythm. You have gaps where nothing happens.’
In northwest Australia, where we are, there was no rain in the season last year, The plains were deeply cracked and grey.
Northwestern Australian landscape, showing its age. Aerial photo by Jarrah Tree.
Aedgar continued, ‘Behind the gap, something builds up to be a lot stronger and a lot faster… People have times when there is no wind and then it’s followed by a huge storm.’
There were floods across the plains and in the valleys when the rains finally came, she recalled.
Aedgar spoke softly, ‘It’s—hmm. We don’t know how to put it.’
Nerida waited quietly.
Eventually, he said. ‘We don’t think that humankind is ready to understand this.’
‘Okay,’ she whispered. There’s something too scary about the consciousness of storms, she thought.
‘Not yet,’ he said.
Nerida sighed.
Aedgar resumed his theme about the magnetic field. ‘If we can put it in a way that’s not scientific—’
She smiled at the irony of a non-physical being occupying her wife’s body, who apologised for storytelling or myth-making. Science could come from within a story.
Aedgar gently straightened the spine. ‘This change to the magnetic field interferes with what you call climate. It interferes with a lot more things, too. There are ‘cracks’ in the Earth: above the surface, below the surface and below the ocean. When the rhythm of the movement changed, these cracks begin to shift. You get changes in temperature, too. The cracks get wider. They get narrower again.
‘It’s as if the Earth is breathing.’
Nerida felt compassion for the planet. ‘Yes.’
‘When one such crack opens under the ocean, the ground widens, then it pushes back together again, which forces a big wave up. And the ground and the water comes up from both sides, making the interference even worse—the interference with that rhythm that used to be there.
Nerida tried to understand. There are earthquakes and tidal waves caused by the change in the magnetic field and the climate and then those events aggravate the changes to the magnetic field and make them worse. She took a deep breath. She needed to pull back from the global scale. ‘Can I ask a question?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where we are, in this place, the rains come once a year. The rains didn’t come last year.
‘Earlier this year the rains did finally come. Then there were floods. Afterwards, the country greened up. The animals got fatter. Everything felt better. Is it that Monsoon rain that’s being delayed or missed? Is that an example of the upset to the rhythm?
‘The gaps. That’s one of the gaps. It might not happen that the rains come at all.’
‘The rain goes all the way around the planet,’ he explained, making circular movements with graceful hands. ‘And it used to have that rhythm. But now you have bigger gaps. And after that gap, you have the build-up. That could mean that there’s nothing happening for (as you call it) one year, two years.
Nerida murmured understanding. The Build Up to the rain was a stressful time in Northern Australia. People started to hurt each other. The suicide rate went up.
‘Yes,’ Aedgar said. ‘When that build up finishes and the water finally comes, it’s so much stronger than the soil and the animals and plants. They can’t handle it.
‘Yes.’
‘They’re not strong enough. They get washed away.’
Aedgar said, ‘And they were weak already because they were missing out.’
Nerida agreed. The skeletal, drought-stricken animals: cattle with their skin draped over their bones, birds looking for dew in the roadside ditches.
‘And then this huge load comes,’ he continued. ‘When that storm comes big trees will go like tiny twigs. The rain and the wind push. Even if the rain is deep, the ground is too dry to let it through. It washes the soil that would be fertile away. It will take a long time to rebuild that soil. We would say you just have to live with bigger storms, more interruptions. It would take many, many lifetimes to make subtle changes.
‘You don’t want to continue the way you did. I’m talking about humankind.’
Nerida agreed, feeling deflated. But she had been thinking that for years, contemplating the plastics waste, money-driven medicine, greedy, thoughtless production of excess, while people still died of poverty: We can’t go on like this.
‘The thing is,’ he pushed on, ‘there is that thought: ‘We will go back to what we think is normal.’ He spoke with impressive force and clarity now:
‘You won’t. There are individuals who talk about ‘a new normal’. But they talk within their own understanding of what they call the new normal, which is more control, more control and interfering with groups of people—’ Nerida thought: Black Lives Matter.
‘Interfering with Nature,’ Aedgar continued, ‘—trying to. You can’t control Nature, you just interfere—mostly in a harmful, negative way.
‘If something gets a little better they think, ‘Oh yeah, we can go back to what we’ve done before.’ This is not how it works!
‘Move forward. Change the way you live. Change the way you do things. Think ahead. Think differently.’
Birds called outside, agitated about the coming storm. She felt invigorated by his words.
A town in the West Australian Kimberley. Photo courtesy W.Bulach.
‘If people did things two hundred years ago and it’s still taught in a similar way, at what you call a University, then you can’t learn new things,’ Aedgar said. ‘Teachers should encourage new ways of thinking: thinking about solutions to problems. You have to think now of solving problems.
‘These problems have been created by humankind. Now, you have to take a few steps back—quite a few—to think differently. Because now the time that you could have used to learn new things to solve old problems— ‘
Is lost? Nerida wondered. Could time be lost? It certainly felt like it.
‘The problems don’t just go away because it’s a different year,’ Aedgar persisted, ‘it’s a different government, it’s a different whatever. Those problems will still be there until people sit and talk together and try to find solutions, together.
‘If everybody, in every corner of the world, thinks ‘This is not my problem,’ well, think again. Because it is, in one way or another. It’s not right to think, ‘Oh that’s far away.’
‘You will be affected by problems created on the other side of the planet.
‘If they have floods there you might not get flooding. You might get the earthquakes that are related to the floods. Or you might not get all the storms. But you might get a tsunami that’s created by this storm on the other side, which was generated, in its turn, by the earthquake over there.’ He moved the hands in opposing directions as if he had the globe between them. ‘Everybody’s suffering. Everybody suffers in a different way.
‘But it’s all related to the same problems. Humankind: you have created it. Solve it. Work on it.
‘It’s late down the track. You’ve been hurtling down that track.’ He took a moment.
’More is not better. Less is more. Less and better quality.’
Nerida felt the weight of truth in the words. After a few moments, she said ‘May I ask a question?’
Aedgar sounded weary. ‘Yes, please.’
‘How did it come to pass that we’ve moved the magnetic field? How did we create a change in the Earth’s magnetic field?’
‘By digging up things—‘ he said.
‘Ah.’
‘—that are not supposed, were never supposed, to be dug up.’
‘Oh.’ Those cavernous, relentless mines.
He continued, ‘You also change the magnetic field by the electromagnetic rays you put up there. You put up satellites. They’re like a swarm of locusts. And they create signals which interrupt what was there.
‘It’s not completely interrupted but it is interfered with.
‘So, the magnetic field is shifting. It has been shifting before. But not at that speed.’
‘Right.’ Nerida leaned forward a little in her chair, writing on her notepad.
‘There was always a little bit of, you know, movement. We’d call it adjustment. The Earth was not always at the same angle to the Sun, as you know. The magnetic field helped with the adjustment. But you interfered with that.
Snapshot of Earth’s dynamic Magnetic Field. nT = nanoteslas. Colours show positive and negative magnetic fields. Illustration by Terrence Sabaka et al./NASA GSFC.
‘You might call that a very negative adjustment.’ His tone was acerbic.
‘Mmm. So, that’s happened quite recently?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the last hundred years?’
‘Yes.’
Nerida thought of Sputnik, the first space satellite, launched five years before she was born. ‘Or less, actually.’
Aedgar spoke at the same time. ‘Less than that. We might put it at the last forty. There was an impact in the last forty to fifty years. We are not good with time, as you know. How can you be good at something that does not exist?’
Nerida sighed. The metaphysical questions could wait for another day. ‘Can you suggest then,’ she asked sadly, ‘a way of helping people heal who have been through terror and trauma because of this sickness, this virus?’
Now Aedgar exhaled sharply. ‘We can only say, identify your mistakes, learn from them. Make sure you do it differently next time.
‘We could say it caught you on the wrong foot. They said, ‘Yeah, it will happen one day. We are prepared.’ You know?
‘And then it did happen. And they realised they’re not prepared at all. Because these things happen rapidly. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I can see it coming. Let’s start working on my projects—on how to handle it.’ That’s too late.
‘It’s provided a bit of an insight into their systems, how quickly this thing moved. You think you have a solution to everything. It’s not true. Continue working. Thinking in new ways, trying to build on some of your knowledge. And be bold enough to abandon some old knowledge.
‘This is not the Spanish Flu. It’s not.
‘You think you’re so advanced. Think again.
‘Work through these things: identify the mistakes, acknowledge the mistakes, try to learn as much as possible from them. Build on what you’ve learned from that. This will give you the satisfaction… to get over it. There is no way of ‘Look out the window, enjoy the blue sky. And everything you’ve done or you haven’t done will be fine.’ This is not how it works. It won’t.’
She felt a frisson of disappointment. She liked the zen idea of doing nothing and letting the Universe unfold. You’re so lazy, she scolded herself.
After a beat, he said, ‘You could give people drugs to expand their minds.’
Nerida smiled. She was interested in work with Ayahuasca and MDMA to help people recover from trauma.
‘We know some won’t like it,’ he said. ‘But for others, it’s helpful to get a broader picture of the planet and of the environment you live in—to expand their minds.’ He paused, made a half-smile. ‘They might get their minds blown. But this is what needs to be done. Work through things—evolve. Grow your wisdom. Raise the energy around you and evolve.
MDMA photo by Pretty Drugthings.
‘If you keep doing the same things that have not worked before, they still don’t work. Be bold enough to abandon it.
‘And don’t listen to those individuals who say: ‘We’ve always done it that way’. Because it never worked that way, holding onto the past: some rules someone has made because they are not bold enough to go forward. Such people should not be in a decision-making position.’
‘Especially not for other people.’ Nerida agreed.
‘No. People have to make decisions within their field of expertise. Don’t make decisions about things that you have no idea about: how it works, where it comes from, how it evolves, nothing. Don’t be that one and make decisions. Because the decisions you make won’t work.
‘Get the people who have the appropriate wisdom and knowledge about the things that are happening.
‘Sometimes their solutions are quite unconventional. And this is what the ones that hold on to old rules will never accept. They say, ‘This is not how we’ve done it back then.’
‘Well, look up. You’re not stuck ‘back then’. And, if you are, get out. Make space for someone who’s bold enough to go in a different direction.’
‘Yes.’
‘You understand?’
‘I understand well. Thank you.’
There was a lull. Nerida pulled her arms into a cardigan she took from the back of the chair.
She felt his energy take a step back. ‘I’m afraid I should leave you, my dear. I think Mari will be tired,’ she said.
He spoke very softly now. ‘Okay. So, we’ll talk to you another time, then?’
‘Yes, please. Thank you.’
‘Thank you for your questions.’
‘I have plenty.’
‘Good,’ he said. She felt him leave the room. Nerida went to the kitchen to turn off the oven.
Mari collapsed her chin onto her chest, murmured, then shook herself and stretched as if waking up.
‘Hello, darling.’ Nerida kissed her wife’s soft cheek. ‘The chicken’s very well done.’
‘Is it?’ Mari said. Getting up, she bent to look in the oven window. ‘You’re hungry enough not to mind, right?’