book review: mutant message downunder part 2

you might call the real people "primitive". except that...marlo observed that they could communicate nonverbally, sometimes at a distance. at one point she is called on to lead the group. they find no food or water for two days. desperate, dying, on the third day, she receives a mental message to suck on a rock. she does, and her saliva flows again. she mentally asks how to find water and receives the message "be water." puzzled, she finally gives up left-brain thinking and begins to imagine herself as water. within half a hour, she rests on a rock and as she leans back, her hand touches a pool of fresh, clean water.

she witnessed the healing of a young man's broken leg. the compound fracture was bad, the bone sticking out of the skin. marlo, a healer herself, observed the real people's healers at work, moving their hands up and down the injured leg an inch from the skin to connect the injured leg with its former healthy pattern, eliminating swelling. two healers and the injured man together chant the bone pieces back into place. then a tar-like ointment made from aged clots of menstrual blood collected from the women was applied to the torn skin. the healing was so complete, he walked on it without a limp the next day.

marlo eventually learned that she and the tribal elder had been born in the same year on the same day at the same time, half the world apart. in a sense, they were soul mates and, she was told, had a soul agreement made before birth to seek each other out after 50 years had passed. it was her destiny to find the Real People, go on walkabout with them, get to know and appreciate them and their culture, and take a message back to the rest of the world.

the message was this: the Real People had made a decision to leave the earth. they elected to be celibate. when the last one of them dies, that will be the end of them.

they asked marlo, the mutant, to share their message, asking the civilized world to pay attention to what the modern way of life is doing to the water, the animals, the air, and the human race. they pray we find a solution to our problems without destroying the world. they said that some mutants were on the edge of regaining their individual spirit of true beingness,and that there is time to reverse the destruction.

but, they said, the rain pattern has already changed. the heat has increased. plant and animal reproduction have lessened. the real people cannot support themselves without food and water in the desert. they cannot help. they can only warn.

so they, along with other endangered species, are the canaries in the coal mine for planet earth. it's an incredible loss to lose the real people. the youngest member was 13 at the time of the book; he'd be 31 now, so a good many real people remain.

i hope they share more of their wisdom with us mutants. to that end, i'm creating a new blog entry, distilled from this book, to be called "lessons from the real people."