Songlines and Dragon Dreaming
Songlines and Dragon Dreaming
Discovering the connection of Australia's First Peoples cosmology and spirituality and the project design and community building framework of Dragon Dreaming
The dotted lines on this colorful painting titled Yarrkalpa, created by native Australian Martu women, are Songlines. They are the pathways between the sacred sites in the land of their „Dreaming“. In Dragon Dreaming, we call the connecting lines between different tasks on our project map Songlines too.
What is the deeper meaning of the connection between Australia's First Peoples cosmology and spirituality and the project design and community building framework of Dragon Dreaming? My work on a Dragon Dreaming book project during 2020-2021 led me on a journey to research Aboriginal culture. I did it from my desk, which was quite disappointing. Mostly white men published about "them.”‘ The books and articles I browsed made little distinction between Australia's hundreds of different native peoples and language groups.
Then I found some more recently published books: Songspirals by the women's collective Bawaka and Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, written by indigenous Australian people about their own culture. These helped me to get a little closer to what I was seeking. The Bawaka collective gifted me with a glimpse of the depth and aliveness of the stories held in songlines, the essential role of the land, and a wider and simpler idea of family. Tyson Yunkaporta fascinated me through the transfers of his described worldview to perspectives as “systems thinking” and “pattern-language”, that I feel guided by since years.
Finally I made contact with Tom Little, an elder from the Noongar people, who knew about Dragon Dreaming himself. We started an exchange where I was able to ask specific questions around Noongar concepts that we apply in the narrative and practice of Dragon Dreaming. Our exchange is still alive. Indeed I thank Tom for reading this text and encouraging me to publish it, for being so supportive and available for this transfer that I know by heart is important for overcoming the divide between peoples, within families, belief systems, and genders. A dream that I am carrying deep inside my heart.
In 2022, something wonderful happened! The exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters traveled to Berlin and my friend and change facilitator colleague Ina Zukrigl-Schief took me there. The exhibit inspired me even more about the Australian Aboriginal peoples' cosmology, to dive deeper into the understanding of Dreaming, Songlines, Country/Land, Totem beings like the Rainbow Serpent. It inspired me to discover more how it all relates to Dragon Dreaming: a mindset and practice on how to live on this earth in deep collaboration with all life.
„Dreaming“ refers to Aboriginal Australian understandings of the world and its creation. Knowledge of the Dreaming is passed on through stories, or Songlines, that map the activities of the ancestral beings, whose travels created the Australian continent (1). These stories about how everything came into existence, the stories of creation (more poetic in German: die Schöpfungsgeschichte), are not only expressed in paintings. They are also expressed in songs (therefore the name), dance and other forms of art. They are not just stories told, they are stories lived, on and on.
The expression of creation stories in song, dance and art during ceremony keeps them alive.
The expression of creation stories in song, dance and art during ceremony keeps them alive. Ceremony is an integral part of First Peoples lives. Noongar people are holding ceremony daily through simple acts, such as “walking gently on the land”. They gather frequently for cultural ceremonies too, for example, from young years on in boys’ and girls’ circles, and in the circle of their individual totem being(2).
This form of living, experiencing, and immersing in their cosmology and spirituality, their most important story, is what makes a true difference. This way their Dreaming is kept alive in a way that is more alive than “reality”. It is the reality. The Songlines are given importance not only in ceremony and art but also in everyday living.
“The Yarrkalpa painting is intended as an encyclopedia of seasons, fire practices, resources and their uses. At the same time, it is a cross-cultural document, shaped by years of interaction between women artists and scholars. The women artists paint what they know and what they do: burning land, following the tracks of reptiles, gathering plant food. The artists paint specific segments and are guided by their embodied knowledge; describing places, memories, ancestors, seasons, resources, burning, hunting and life. Martu knowledge about the distribution and habits of plants and animals is embedded in the painting, and when someone asks the right questions, this knowledge appears.”(3)
The Dragon Dreaming project map is intended to be a directory of all the things done and manifested to make your dream come true. In the project map of the Vanilla Way network shown above these are things like practicing an “initiation ritual”, writing up a constitution, team building and developing a business model as well as knowledge transfer, reflection, connection and feedback. Each of the tasks are home in one of the four territories of dreaming, panning, doing and celebration. They are consciously placed more to the outer edges (environment) or the inner core (purpose and vision). The location on the map gives the tasks its quality and meaning. The task “legal & accounting” is part of the celebration in this project. It makes the project viable and sustainable. “Team building” is located in planning closer to purpose. We acknowledge and transmit through this map that team building requires quite some coordinating efforts to bring everyone together and it’s fueling the project's purpose and the project's purpose is fueling team building.
The project map is shaped collectively by the life's experience of everyone.
The project map is a cross-culture document as well. It’s shaped collectively by the life's experience of everyone. Every task is added by a team member as a vision of what needs to be created or experienced by the group so the dream comes true. It’s the collective inner knowing of the group consciousness made visible and accessible. As the Martu women in the Yarrkalpa artwork “paint what they know and what they do”, the team of a Dragon Dreaming project as well draws what they know from their life's experience about what needs to be done to make a certain dream come true. And when the drawing of the project map is done and the team is living the project, they come back to the map for questions and reflection. The map will show them, where the project is blocked, what they might have forgotten to pay attention to, it helps them to celebrate everything that's already done, that's already one the way. As in the Marut’s womens painting, if they ask the right questions, the knowledge appears.
What we give attention to grows. This is true for any culture. In fact, western culture's “reality” is also based on stories. It is based on certain narratives on how the world functions (e.g. economy, psychology and history). We are just not so aware of it, since we are backing our stories with science. Science claims to be more true than story. At the same time there is less and less wisdom passed on through elders and their lived experience. Wisdom becomes knowledge becomes information becomes data becomes noise(4). The antidote to this can be to reconnect to the story that is most meaningful to us. And to express it, share it, and live it with others.
“The projects we do give our life its meaning” - John Croft
“The projects we do give our life its meaning”, Dragon Dreaming elder John Croft tells, and “Every project starts with the dream of an individual”. “However 99% of projects already fail in the dreaming stage… because people don’t share their dreams!” I remember John's words so vividly from my first Dragon Dreaming training in 2011. This course changed my life. It was what I needed to hear, to feel empowered to believe in my dreams, share my dreams and express them in the form of many projects, with each one of them having changed my life. A Dragon Dreaming project is a transformation accelerator. Yes, it's also a process and practical set of methods to collectively dream, plan and do a project. However, never underestimate the transformative power of a dream lived!
Dragon Dreaming is designed to put the story of your project first. Before planning and doing, and celebrating your project, dreaming comes first! We are literally telling each other the creation story of our project before it actually happened, how it came into existence, in its highest form, the best way we can dream of. This is a practice we do in Dragon Dreaming, the collective envisioning process called the Dream Circle. Yet once envisioned we don’t put the dream aside, we continue to create from and through it. We set objectives and goals and then we draw the project map with tasks and Songlines, the map for our Dreaming, also called game-board. It’s meant as a plan to play. To do what's needed, but to keep it playful.
If we really want to believe in our dreams, they need to come alive in the dreaming stage.
In Dragon Dreaming we share a story. For a project to be sustainable it must contain 25% dreaming, 25% planning, 25% doing and 25% celebrating. After diving into Aboriginal mythology I still believe this is true. However, our dedication to keep our dreams continuously alive, is an immensely underestimated requirement to make them come true. If we really want to believe in our dreams, they need to come alive in the dreaming stage. We are called to dance them, sing them, picture them into existence. If we as a team, as a community, as citizens of this world, want to see our collective dreams coming true we need to gather: Gather to create art, to sing and to dance the story of the world we wanna live in into existence.
SOURCES
Glossary, in Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (exhibition booklet, english section), Berlin, Germany: Stiftung Humboldt Forum, 2022
Little, Tom: Dialogue Interview with Manuela Bosch, Perth/Berlin, 11th of September 2023.
This country is us, in Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (exhibition catalog, german edition), Berlin, Germany: Stiftung Humboldt Forum, 2022, page 54
Croft, John: 7 steps to change the World in 9 months!, PMP 2012 Paeveer Masing Production, filmed at Krishna Valley, Hungary, 14th of July 2012, minute 16 et sqq.
Thanks goes to Noongar elder Tom Little for feedback and encouragement, and to Svetlana Zabolotnaia and Mary Ann Schmidt from Dragon Dreaming network in the US for editing and proofreading this text.