The Game of Shepherd and Dawse (3 page)

Nothing went to waste from the animals in Shepherd Wood and nothing else went to waste either. There was no such thing as rubbish as there was a use for everything. As people here only possessed exactly what they needed and nothing more, no one ever had the need to throw anything out. What would be the point? If something broke - which was rare, as everything was made to last then - it would be carefully repaired in a way which just gave it more character.

The society of Shepherd Wood didn’t need control structures and never had any person who wielded more control than another. The community did however have the Wise Council. These were members of the community who were at least 100 years old – considered young for the Council, as people in this era could and did live to ages of up to 300 years. The reasons why people lived so long were a combination of things: pure food, a lack pollutants in the air, water and soil and especially the intrinsic ability to self-heal. If a person was guided to move on to the next plane of existence, they would allow their bodies to degenerate and then they would pass over.

The members of the Wise Council lived for as long as they could because that was their purpose – to stay around and help as many people as they could. The Wise Council didn’t deal with the kind of counselling we think of today. The sorts of issues they counselled on were things like giving advice to someone who had tried to master something but who wasn’t having great success or sharing stories and tales from the past that had been passed down by other Council members throughout the ages.

No one ever put themselves forward to be on the Wise Council as that would have been disrespectful. Instead, other people would nominate you. The nomination process would happen over many years, if one of yours friends gave you some very good wisdom on a certain matter you would repay that person by finding the most attractive stone you could find and then place it outside their house as a way of saying thank you. It would also serve as a memory marker so that whenever either party looked at that stone it would remind them of that wisdom that had been given and accepted. Over time the amount of stones would increase outside a person’s house. The more stones you had the more people would come to you for guidance and the more guidance you gave the more stones you would have.

When a house had a complete stone circle around it (which would take many years) the person would then automatically become part of the Wise Council. It was a great way of having those who were naturally wise to be in the best position for the benefit of the whole community.

There was one topic, though, that would be a regular theme and that was the topic of love. But even in Shepherd Wood, love didn’t happen in the same way it happens today. In today's society, people work hard to convince themselves they've found true love, whereas most of the time it is nothing more than two people who get on rather well, minus the odd argument here or there. In the days of Shepherd Wood, a union was made only when two people had found their exact other half of themselves. When they found this person, it was a celebrated occasion. They would live in perfect harmony with each other for the rest of their lives and would never do anything hurtful to one another, as that would be like hurting themselves, which is something that no one ever did. The phenomenon of self-harming came into existence at a much later time, after the interbreeding of the two different tribes took place.

Finding this perfect love was never a given nor guaranteed, even in this idyllic, beautiful place and way of life. Those who did find true love were very well respected and much celebrated. There was no jealousy from the other people who wished to find love, as the people who had found love themselves would show the others how to bring that union closer to them. All on the Wise Council had at some point found their true love. Sometimes they would stay together until they both decided to pass over and sometimes one would decide to pass over early. This would be a decision fully supported by both wise partners. There would be no mourning, as again this was something introduced to mankind later on as another means of diminishing personal energy, making people feel miserable and therefore easier to control. The passing over of a person was a great event and their life would be celebrated in the full glory in which it had been lived. It was one of the most joyous occasions to occur in all of Shepherd Wood.

For those who didn’t find their true love, they could find love of a different kind. Love and affection was always something in great abundance in Shepherd Wood. You could share an intimate embrace or passionate kiss with another person and that was perfectly ok, as it was simply seen as an exchange of energy. No one got jealous and no one misinterpreted another’s actions. It was a nice way of saying to someone, “I very much like your soul and I’m glad that you’re here at this given time”.

The one piece of knowledge instilled in every child of Shepherd Wood, without fail, was that to find true love you had to become the best person you could possibly be and utilise all of your talents and gifts. Some people did this very quickly and some people took much longer, depending on how important true love was to them. And because this was how residents found true love, it proved an amazing motivator for people to always strive to be better than what they were. This meant there were people who could do the most amazing things, not just with their hands and bodies but with their minds and voices as well.

Evening entertainment could spring up on any given night, as there was no such thing as structured days to the week. There didn’t need to be. People always worked as hard as they could and if they needed rest, they would take it. If for some reason lots of people had learned their skills and wanted to perform, there would be performances every evening until each of them had showed off their new talents. Having a two-week long party was not uncommon. Though after a two-week long party, people would be a bit more worn out than usual and things around Shepherd Wood would move at a slower pace for a while. Performances would be curtailed, which gave everyone enough time to recover and not become victims of overindulgence.

There was no such thing as addictions in Shepherd Wood, even though there were many mind-altering substances available to take. No one was addicted to anything because no one was trying to escape from anything. Everyone was completely content. Any mind-altering substance would be taken for a specific reason and that reason was to enhance an experience or expand their minds in ways one cannot do without such substances. During these encounters, a person would be guided by their chosen member of the Wise Council, who would shepherd them through their experience.

It would be easy to think that in a society like this that no one ever got upset, but on occasion people would get upset, as it was a natural process of dealing with life’s frustrations.

Like everything else in Shepherd Wood, people’s frustrations were also quite different from what we think frustrates us today. Some people would get frustrated because they hadn’t managed to master a new skill as quickly as they desired, which meant true love had to wait a bit longer. The most common cause of frustration was when they had been working too hard and not retaining a good balance within their wellbeing, which would then slow down their learning process.

The elders could always spot when this was happening and when someone was doing this to themselves, but they would never alert the person, as this was something each had to master and stumble across for themselves. When the person did eventually realise what they had been doing, the inevitable crying phase would kick in and all their frustration would be released. This was such a natural way of living that no one batted an eye when a person was practicing a release exercise. Quite often you would see someone standing on the spot with tears running down their face for a short while and then go about their daily business as though nothing had ever happened. No one would think twice about what was happening just in the same way today we don’t think twice when we see someone going for a walk. To have a cry was considered to be like giving the soul an oil change it was just something that occasionally had to be done.

Even though the people of Shepherd Wood were much more advanced than we are today, no computers existed such as we know them. Instead, they had super human computers. These were people who had dedicated vast amounts of time to training their brain to work at lightning speeds and the calculations they could do were phenomenal. Every so often a distant relative of these people surfaces in our current society. We call them autistic savants. Sadly for these gifted people, their memories are so very good and they remember this forgotten time of bliss so very well that the modern world they were born into greatly disturbs them. Although they reside here in body, parts of their mind remain detached from our modern world which is uncomfortably hectic, loud and harsh for them mentality. This behaviour can make many savants appear a little peculiar, though in fact these few special beings we have on this planet, maintain a direct link to our forgotten times.

Unlike many modern conveniences we rely on today, metal was not something widely used in the time of Shepherd Wood. People instinctively knew mining was very damaging to mother Earth. Imagine for a moment, if someone were to drill a tiny hole in your body and slowly suck out all of your veins, just as large corporations do today with veins of metal in our Earth. Eventually you would die. Thus, the people of these times made much of what they needed from stone and rock, as this is something nature makes naturally and replenishes.

The only metal used was metal found lying in rocks on the surface of the planet. These small amounts of metal were used for several purposes and that was for hand tools, eating utensils and also used to make concave shiny disks. These disks could reflect the sun and magnify it onto another shiny disk, which would be repeated many times until the sunlight became so concentrated it could quite easily cut large pieces of rock with pinpoint precision. In certain parts of the world, they used this technology to build huge structures out of stone, structures we still marvel at all these years later.

The elders of Shepherd Wood were very spiritual people whose practices had been passed down throughout the ages. Perhaps due to this, the spiritual elders had sensed a foreboding for some time, though none could quite put a finger on what was bothering them. All they could be sure of was that there were going to be some very trying times ahead.

The inhabitants of Shepherd Road were not as content as those who lived in Shepherd Wood. It was modern times and the society was structured very differently. It was a society based on taking and rarely giving. The main motivation for these modern day people was money and it was money that consumed people the most.

It was money that gave some more than others and it was money that made some people go without. It was money that motivated wars and it was money that was used to enslave people, yet it was money that most people valued the most. The very few people who controlled money made sure that money controlled everything.

CHAPTER TWO

MR SADSOUL

“
Smile at the world and the world will smile back”. ~ Joe Sadsoul

Shepherd Road was very typical of a southern seaside town. It was very clean and tidy and all of the houses had their own character which was a representation of the people who lived in them. Some houses still had the brick showing and some houses had been rendered. Some houses had pebble dash and one house even had stone cladding. Every house had a small front garden and everyone’s garden walls were slightly different. When the houses were originally built, they all had ornate railings. But these had been taken by the government during the Second World War due to a shortage of steel for the war effort. They promised, of course, that the railings would all be replaced after the war ended but like so many government promises, it hadn’t been fulfilled.

The only scruffy house in Shepherd Road was the house on the end where an unsavoury character by the name of Phil Duckley lived. A scruffy character who lived in a scruffy house, the scruffiest on the street. The residents of Shepherd Road had renamed him 'Dickie Duckley', as in Phil 'the Dick' Duckley, because he was such a dick.

Most of the children on Shepherd Road were in on the joke and took great delight in calling him Dickie to his face. The joke was on him though and poor Dickie wasn’t even aware of it.

Dickie Duckley had black scruffy hair and his clothes weren’t much better. He was the sort of person no one naturally gravitated toward and on the rare occasion someone would encounter him, Dickie would make some stupid comment trying to be funny, though he never really made anyone laugh. His social skills had deserted him many decades ago. One minute Dickie would appear polite and cordial and the next he would give out a glaring look as if to say 'Don’t mess with me'. He had a dark energy about him and even to the untrained eye, you couldn’t help but notice and feel uneasy about him.

Dickie Duckley was Dawse through and through and had little else going for him. Shortly after taking up residence on Shepherd Road, Dickie decided to buy a couple of pet snakes. One reason he did this, twisted little soul that he was, was because he loved to throw the small animals in at feeding time to watch them suffer in fear. But there was another reason Dickie opted for snakes rather than a more conventional pet like a dog or a cat, a more sinister reason. Dickie’s house was situated exactly where many of the school children crossed the road, courtesy of the lollypop lady, who the council had hired to stop accidents from happening. Most days, Dickie would watch the children coming home from school in the hope that he could lure one of them into his house to have a look at the snakes and goodness knows what after that.