...And We Will Have Snow

Interregnum 3

Bear and Sedna had come of age during the development and deployment of the Dome Dream and the World Dream. Both had taken on these challenges with the enthusiasm of adolescent youth. But as they dealt with the complexities of broad implementation, their own conceptions of the nature of cultural evolution had itself evolved and matured.

From their earliest days they had been immersed in the ancient understanding of the shaman way, and they understood it as the root of all subsequent spiritual and religious thought, a fundamental human interpretation of the way of the spirit. But this understanding had remained essentially personal, and therefore somewhat superficial, until their direct contacts with others, other views and other cultures, had acquainted them with the tremendous variety of views such personal experience could entail.

Even Sedna, with her easy recall of her earlier existence, needed this exposure to help her internalize the wider reality. Bear too, whose awareness of other perspectives acquired through his talent for assuming the viewpoint of other creatures had been the foundation of his own dream, was astounded by the variety of views available among other people.

This brought them both to understand more thoroughly the special nature of human cultural evolution. It was far too easy to oversimplify the idea of the multiple paths this evolution had taken in the long generations of human existence. The vast variety of cultural views that had evolved over the ages, and had recently begun to merge into a new age of mutual acceptance, was another source of astonishment.

Bear and Sedna, and now Xayna too, spent many hours dreaming together and discussing the implications, both cultural and spiritual, of these facts. They relished every opportunity to engage the elders of their little community in such discussions. Dema and Cern of course, but Naga, Juan, and Tengri, and all the rest, helped them expand their awareness in this way.

They had acquired the perspective to see that the degree of cultural evolution that now seemed inevitable would be a slow process, likely spanning generations before it truly settled into a new world order.

It was with this maturing sense of the meaning of communal life that Bear and Xayna, after the ramifications of the Sea Dream experience had begun to settle down, returned to Haida Gwaii to establish a more normal life together, perhaps to inspire and assist whatever evolution of thought was needed there.

Sedna, too, with her World Dream ambitions realized, discovered that she had other longings, and began to let her dreams expand into a new phase...