Sitting at the Knee of Wisdom
Above, an Aboriginal perspective of the heavens and earth as depicted on the WA Museum’s website for the Songlines Exhibition. Australian indigenous culture sees the heavens and earth as a whole where in the Dreamtime people created paths that cross and map both.
The Songline of the Seven Sisters as related from the Aboriginal Dreamtime describes a line of footprints that can be followed. The story follows the sisters across the sky in the constellation of Pleiades. They are fleeing a man who is a shape shifter and is chasing them from a star in Orion’s belt. On their journey the sisters rest in places on the earth, leaving their footprints. The line of footprints crosses all Australia and several cultural groups. Places where the sisters came to earth to rest, gather food and dance are mapped by features in the landscape, for example where they danced is an expansive clay pan. Two caves in a cliffside are the eyes of the man chasing them. He is always watching them. The Aboriginal connection to country encompasses the heavens and earth. In the Songlines Exhibition it is described like this:
“A ‘Jukurrpa’ is one particular line, one pathway. When you follow that journey you’ll see where they [the sisters] left behind parts of their stories. You gotta follow their footprints. You can see parts of the story in the land.…. Like the epic poems of the great oral traditions, songlines are a way of holding and passing on knowledge. They contain protocols of behaviour and information for survival in an unpredictable and volatile environment - where water and food can be found, where there is potential risk, and how to act to minimise that risk. By embedding information in a story, and performing that story in dance and song, an entire continent has been mapped by and for its people.”
As I followed the ‘line of footprints’ through the exhibition I found myself making links with yoga. From the yoga perspective, in comparison to the Dreamtime, ours is a young philosophy. “Yoga recognises the cosmos is a vast structure of interlocking and nested wholes”. (Tamara Yoga teacher training manual). In yoga Svadyaya, self study, is not only the study of the self, but also the study of ancient wisdom. We do not have to reinvent the wheel, it already exists and is a foundation from which we can grow. Wisdom is not owned by any one culture or philosophy. For myself, sitting at the knee of Wisdom wherever it is found and the knowledge I gain becomes part of my lineage. In yoga we speak of lineages. I for example, follow the ISHTA lineage. I feel that my experience with the Seven Sisters Songline of the Dreamtime is part of my growth within my line to be shared further.