And, the closer they and we push ourselves to the brink of extinction, the louder and more obvious they will become.

THIS is the reason we should be marching in the streets, because if this occurs, our american collective childish boo hooing  over our wall street losses boo boos won’t matter one hoot.  Those little pieces of paper they’ve all been whining about will just become  part of the large pile of ashes left behind in the nuclear winter of our discontents.

In fact, it has been my opinion from the beginning that the attention heaped on the OWS movement has been a huge main stream media distraction from the agenda of much more lethal purpose.

Let’s wake up, people and get our priorities straight.  Dollar bills don’t make relationships;  nor do they bestow worthiness nor power nor entitlements.   Our global commonalities will be found in our collective unification for our physical survival.

by Alfred Heinz

globalresearch.ca

January 11, 2012

NEW YORK – USA – In a remarkable admission by former Nixon era Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, reveals what is happening at the moment in the world and particularly the Middle East. [ACCURATE SATIRE]

Speaking from his luxurious Manhattan apartment, the elder statesman, who will be 89 in May, is all too forward with his analysis of the current situation in the world forum of Geo-politics and economics.

“The United States is bating China and Russia, and the final nail in the coffin will be Iran, which is, of course, the main target of Israel. We have allowed China to increase their military strength and Russia to recover from Sovietization, to give them a false sense of bravado, this will create an all together faster demise for them. We’re like the sharp shooter daring the noob to pick up the gun, and when they try, it’s bang bang. The coming war will will be so severe that only one superpower can win, and that’s us folks. This is why the EU is in such a hurry to form a complete superstate because they know what is coming, and to survive, Europe will have to be one whole cohesive state. Their urgency tells me that they know full well that the big showdown is upon us. O how I have dreamed of this delightful moment.”

“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”

Mr Kissinger then added: “If you are an ordinary person, then you can prepare yourself for war by moving to the countryside and building a farm, but you must take guns with you, as the hordes of starving will be roaming. Also, even though the elite will have their safe havens and specialist shelters, they must be just as careful during the war as the ordinary civilians, because their shelters can still be compromised.”

After pausing for a few minutes to collect his thoughts, Mr Kissinger, carried on:

“We told the military that we would have to take over seven Middle Eastern countries for their resources and they have nearly completed their job. We all know what I think of the military, but I have to say they have obeyed orders superfluously this time. It is just that last stepping stone, i.e. Iran which will really tip the balance. How long can China and Russia stand by and watch America clean up? The great Russian bear and Chinese sickle will be roused from their slumber and this is when Israel will have to fight with all its might and weapons to kill as many Arabs as it can. Hopefully if all goes well, half the Middle East will be Israeli. Our young have been trained well for the last decade or so on combat console games, it was interesting to see the new Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 game, which mirrors exactly what is to come in the near future with its predictive programming. Our young, in the US and West, are prepared because they have been programmed to be good soldiers, cannon fodder, and when they will be ordered to go out into the streets and fight those crazy Chins and Russkies, they will obey their orders. Out of the ashes we shall build a new society, there will only be one superpower left, and that one will be the global government that wins. Don’t forget, the United States, has the best weapons, we have stuff that no other nation has, and we will introduce those weapons to the world when the time is right.”

End of interview. Our reporter is ushered out of the room by Kissinger’s minder.

It captures the true predicament we have made for ourselves and the “collateral damage” of our participation in all of it with our own people and within our own selves, right here at home.  Time to explore the borders of our own internal landscapes at a more adult level.  As within, so without.

In light on the journey.

Click below for the video.

A Voice in the Desert

The celestial arrangement overhead on that day does, indeed, contain a lovely, harmonious Grand Trine between Pluto, Jupiter and Mars.  They are all, however, firmly rooted in the Earth signs:  Capricorn, Taurus and Virgo, respectively.  This particular Grand Trine is actually what is known as a kite, and the anchoring thread and intended bulls eye is Neptune/Chiron in Aquarius/Pisces.  At the time, the Sun and Moon will be just past their full opposition, with Sun in Scorpio and Moon in Taurus.  Earth, water and the overall motion of descent are the actual overall themes in this particular transit.

The configuration overhead has a lovely, resonant geometry, as all Grand Trines do.  However, their collective presence in the Earth signs means that, rather than standing on our imaginary mountain, arms spread wide, looking up toward some new horizon, we should, rather, be bowing our heads and gazing downward, upon the very ground where our feet should be firmly planted.  That is the work of this hour and this day, as well as our larger task during this particular epoch in human history.  The celestial sounding here clearly indicates we need to conduct more thorough archeological digs on the cultural foundations we have constructed ourselves.  We are here to take up the shovel and the spade and do the real healing work on planet earth we have thus far, continued to avoid.

With Pluto a primary anchor in Capricorn, very real death and decay of our old paradigms is part and parcel of our celestial pattern and will be in the mix until 2024.   Death is naturally accompanied by a period of silence and grief and mourning.  Once the decaying body has been removed, it is a time when we draw the blinds of our souls closed and reflect upon the life now gone from us, of viscerally taking in all of its brutal facts:  the voice of our loved one we will never hear again, the familiar sight of their gait and facial expressions that fade into the walls, the odors of their personal scents wafting down empty hallways, the necessary cleaning out of the closets of their now useless possessions and clothing.  These reflections are meant to be accompanied by a solitary and profound silence, experienced alone.

Those who have summoned the courage to sit through the dying of another know it is also as a painful gift: a time to reach out and touch our own mortality, to contemplate the errors we have made, to imagine into how we want to be remembered after we, too, succumb to the natural rhythm of the cycles of life.  It is an extraordinarily beautiful, poignant time to take stock of the coordinates of our own personal compass and reset them to take us to the place of our more noble selves.  We can only do so through our willingness to turn over the stones of regret, of paths we could have taken but did not, of opportunities we missed to enter into more real and authentic relationship with the ones we have lost.  Owning every single one of those regrets, mistakes and errors is what it means to be a full adult.  They are no less a part of our experience than the successes and joys we usually focus on.  As the adults at the funereal wake, not the children sent out to the backyard to scan for alien ships in their best clothes while the grownups grieve indoors.

Indigenous Calendars Are Ending:  The Real Facts

The Mayan Calendar is ending.  The Hopi end times have arrived.  The truth of the matter here is that the Mayan Calendar and the ancient hieroglyphs of the people who wrote these and other indigenous master works actually contain very little predictive statements at all.  No promised states of bliss, no light descending upon the people, no transportation into another dimension. The fact is that these calendars simply end, without explanation.  Then, a void, a blank.  This state, the profound silence after activity has ceased, is the cyclical part of life and death we are here to master.  It is the period of time humanity is entering.

Unfortunately, western societies have, over centuries, built walls and institutions designed to remove us from the unavoidable facts of death and our relationship with the natural cycles of ebb and flow, of feminine spiritual wisdom, of the constant of infinity.  We have sequestered our dying in sterile rooms attended by professionals, far from our homes and hearths.  In our modern world, we have been taught to continue on our way despite the presence of death and to busy ourselves with the busyness of life.  We have, in effect, been stripped of our ability to sit with it and know death’s intimate permutations.  We strive to stave off that impending, irrefutable moment we will all face by skipping out on those of our friends and family.  We rabidly consume  pine nuts, surgical procedures and weekly shots of botox to mask its constant presence in our lives.  Such are the activities conceived of in an adolescent brain, still feebly trying to avoid the fact of our own mortality and, instead, inventing fantasies designed to gain control of processes which are, and always will remain, beyond our manipulations.  An end is an end.  Period.  The period of nothing that follows in its wake is a necessary part of our process.  This is what lies at the “end of the calendar” here.

Time to Grow Ourselves Up

Indigenous cultures know this, as well as individuals who have refused to sever their intimate and abiding connection with the divine mother, waxing and waning as she does throughout the cosmos and down into the roots of our planet, into our very cells.  Our job here is to ground ourselves down into her sustaining wisdom and grow ourselves up to meet its challenges, not run off toward some new horizon like the herd of juveniles we have are right now.

It is, in fact, northwestern hemisphereans who have created all kinds of exciting new adventures for us to ooh and aah over in the face of the end of the indigenous calendars. Unable to summon the courage to face the period of the necessary Void before us, they have rushed in to fill the impending darkness, hawking their baubles of renewed abundance, spewing reams of book and workshop babble, and assuring us that only positive events shall unfold.  It is akin to scheduling a full makeover for a comatose patient in the ICU in her last 24 hours of life.  And there are plenty of makeup artists out there.

They are nothing more than the most recent propheteers of our time.  They are the equivalent of a spiritual branch of the TSA, deployed to “protect” us from our terror of death, decay and the unknown.  The new age/progressives have failed to realize the full extent to which they have been co-opted into the mainstream theme of institutionalized, hierarchical control of the masses.  The new age/ascensionist/non-duality proponents are our current pied pipers of institutionally supported denial, leading the groups of sheep out into huge spiritual playgrounds promising lots of sugar plumbs to their devotees, who are merely the large group of plain folk also unable to meet the adult realities of the failure of our way of life and, ultimately, of our transient bodies.  Like our own government, which kicks the can of truth of our economic bankruptcy continuously down the road, the new agers are here to serve a similar purpose in trying to disguise our spiritual and moral bankruptcy from us as well.

We come into the world alone and we leave it alone.  These are very solitary activities.  So is the pursuit of art and creativity. Those who have not developed their own, personally intimate relationship with the cosmic mother and their own internal wealth are those still sitting in the audiences of conferences promising new realities, buying the books and dvd’s, and quoting their favorite new guru while doing their feel-good workbook exercises with similarly spiritually developmentally delayed cohorts.

Americans in particular have been trained to believe in the very juvenile concept that we should always be experiencing more:  more abundance, more joy, more happiness, more money, more goods and services to consume.  Out of this depleted state of immaturity, we created the bubbles of finances, real estate, information and government.  Sorry, but those balloons have all popped and reaching out for the new and improved spiritual balloon will fail us as well. So will our notion that we deserve the goodies without doing the real work necessary here.

Graduation Time

So, the message is that it doesn’t matter how much makeup you put on that corpse , uh, yeah, the dude’s still dead.  And by the smell of it, for a bit of a while already, too.  We need to stop, right now, participating in the group mind of Head Start children our larger culture has relentlessly tried to turn us all into.  And succeeded in, to a very large extent.  I am refusing to treat us all like children at the amusement park, spinning one-sided yarns out of the cotton candy machine and feeding you more fluffy, non-nutritional foods.  Better to wake up and recognize the truly condescending insults to our intelligence such efforts really are.

Our heavenly bodies refuse to participate in such human nonsense as well.  The message of the Grand Trine of 11/11/11, at 11 o’clock, is plain and clear.  Pluto in Capricorn in the 2nd house in the chart of America, is all about kicking our old structures and value systems out from underneath us.  Many astrological writers have already written of this and I am certainly not covering new ground here.  Pluto and her revelations of secrets is the good swift kick in the butt we never received in spiritual junior high.  The destruction already well under way in our structural framework is not limited to our financial and governmental institutions, however.  Included in that destruction are the emotional and relational bonds we have constructed from the scaffoldings of those institutions.

At the hour of the unfolding of this master number, in the city of america’s birth, Pluto sits in the 12th house, the house of our karmic debts.  This is not a coincidence.  America and its population do, indeed, have an enormously large karmic debt to settle with the rest of humanity.  Whining and pointing the finger at others is not going to work.  If you have found yourself incarnated as an american at this time and place, you have chosen to do so for a reason.  You did, indeed, choose to physically manifest as an individual within the collective of america and the spiritual assignment of that choice is just beginning.  Taking responsibility for our very large collective debt to the planet is what we have signed up for as a people and as individuals enjoying the privileges of inhabiting this country.  While we have helped ourselves quite conspicuously and abundantly to the privileges, we have utterly ignored our real responsibilities.

The utter and appalling wrongs of our colonialist and arrogant mindset, developed over centuries and philosophically and physically exerted through our multiple and illegal military occupations of other nations, as well as our concomitant pillaging and raping of others’ rightful resources and murdering of other humans, is part of the package we are meant to deal with. Utilizing that hegemonic group mind, as the new agers do, to try to transport us out of the field of responsibility to some new frontier, full of newer and better possibilities, doesn’t cut the mustard.  We have a duty to fulfill here.  You.  And me.  And we are not going anywhere until we do.

Unlike the pathological human brains that thought up the idea, Karma doesn’t keep two sets of books, and the time of our reckoning has arrived for all of us to bear.  Pluto, the spiritual, forensic auditor has arrived.

That arrival just so happens to dovetail nicely with that brand new movement Occupy Wall Street.  And who are these protestors?  Largely, they are the middle class who are only now voicing outrage because they have begun sorely hurting in the pocket.  Such outrage is the narcissistic whining of the spoiled child.  Busy accumulating their wealth and flat screen tv’s and fabulous homes while the times were good (for them), it is only when their way of life is threatened that they summon their selfishly-motivated passions for justice and equality.  These are, however, the same group of people who were all about Not In My Backyard when it came to elevating the poor out of poverty and who ignored our spiritual and moral need for justice and equality in caring for the vulnerable and underprivileged of us in decades past.  As long as they were realizing outrageous expansions in their assets through real estate flipping and speculative investing, they stayed nice and comfy inside the horizons of their own living rooms.

Now, they are on the streets.  Many of these newly angered OWS are members of the former sixties love gang who, decades ago, traded in their peace signs and head garlands of daisies  for the very same chairs in those corporate executive offices they now vilify.  These are the same people who parked their vw camper vans in the backyard and hitched their bmw’s to those brilliant, immoral and unethical shenanigans of the boys of wall street.  And these newly-minted OWSers ate up the gravy train of profit earned off the backs of billions of humans doing the real work for slave wages and the raping of our global environment while they lounged around watching their portfolios rise.  Anyone who “earned” those external and artificially constructed privileges by investing in, and indebting themselves to, the very same banks/mortgage companies that they now throw stones at should realize they are, indeed, directly responsible for the vast abuses of our mother earth and a huge majority of her population of flora and fauna.

Failure to cultivate, on our own and for no other reason than that it is the right thing to do, the necessary internal qualities of adult relationship: humility, humbleness, gratitude and respectful relationship, leaves us with having to learn our lessons externally through humiliation, deprivation, injustice and limitation.  That would sound familiar if americans bothered to view our actions from the perspective of those who have had to suffer at our hands.

As we all know, our new found and growing limitations are the role Saturn plays in the lives of those unwilling to get the message on their own.  America is still feeling the reverberations of our Saturn return of December 3, 2010.  Saturn is trine to Neptune/Chiron at the moment and we will find ourselves feeling the need to descend deeper into our personal emotional dishonesties right now.  As Pluto progresses toward her own date of return with the natal chart of america (exact on February 20, 2022), the dark squeeze is going to continue.  Welcome to the realms of the Void after the death of the old way of being.  With Saturn on the scene, it looks like its going to be the hard school of education for most.

Mars in Virgo in the 8th house trining Pluto is our warrior planet in the house of the occult, secrets and sexuality, sharpening her sword to ensure our perfect precision (Virgo) in piercing into our collective psychosis of organizing institutions and behaviors.  All of our unconscious notions of relationships, from business to marriage partnerships, as well as our notions of trust and intimacy, are going to be exposed under the knife here.  The meditation for this master day should focus on summoning the courage to look deeply within and beginning the process of moral, ethical and spiritual correction we need to undergo.

Mars opposite Neptune/Chiron signals that our work is to be found in unraveling our spiritual and emotional ties (Neptune) to, and the karmic wounds suffered (Chiron) by, our attachments to the institutional frameworks (Pluto), now crumbling, of our former life.  As noted previously in this article, this Grand Trine is actually a kite formation, Neptune/Chiron forming both her anchoring point and the bulls eye that the drawn bow of Mars in Virgo is about to release.  Neptune/Chiron is sextile Pluto here and we can reap great rewards of insight and enlightenment if we take up the task at hand.  There is an enormous amount of anguish and suffering we have all gone through together within the limiting and abusive structures of our political/financial/military institutions.  Our job is not to slap on that new age face and play pretend yet again, but rather to allow that anguish and suffering to transmit to us emotionally, mentally and kinesthetically when the point of the Mars arrow strikes its mark. In our own feelings of victimhood, we uncover the face of ourselves as abuser.

Neptune requires us to let go of ourselves personally and dissolve our personal consciousness into the collective sufferings of all.  Her placement, briefly, in the mental sign of Aquarius, now moving forward again after a retrograde, is our signal to examine the exact machinations of our mental illness in having wrought such horrors upon others.  Calypso’s (Neptune) future descent for a long period of time into Pisces will be our opportunity to examine the emotional/spiritual imbalances we have cultivated and experienced as a result of  the larger political/social/economic institutions inside of which we have imprisoned our natural responses to the world.  That would be the voice of the “We,” which has been gagged into the “I” by the guiding philosophy of profit through consumption at any cost.  This is the beginning of our ability to exercise compassionate judgment and activity toward others.  This is reflexive compassion:  as we are able let go of our singular focus on ourselves and gaze upon the wounds of others at our collective hands, so also can we then see and feel our own.  Until then, we simply stay put in the adolescent sociopathic narcissism at which we have become the most advanced adepts on the planet.

Jupiter in Taurus is the third arm of the trine and is straddling the third and fourth houses on 11/11/11 at 11.  We are dealing here with a reckoning of our foundations in our cultural “family ” (4th house) and thought/form communication (3rd house) processes.  Jupiter in Taurus represents our opportunity to heal the wounds of our previous disconnection to our Cosmic Mother and her physical manifestation, Mother Earth.  The Moon in Taurus underlines this in bold.  Many familiar with ancient (that is, pre-patriarchal forms of social and cultural organization) cultures will remember that the Cosmic Mother is often represented in such civilizations as the Cow or Bull.  Her milk was drunk frequently by the temple priestesses/priests and lay people alike in honor of, and in reverence for,  her endless gifts of the nurturing fluids of life.   We have, over time, been duped into accepting an artificial replacement for the abundant and continual sustenance of the Cosmic Mother’s milk:  dry pieces of paper called dollar bills doled out by the pallid, pasty, white hands of our patriarchs – our reward rations for obedience.  We have been sucking at the wrong anatomy for millennia now, and any grown up knows that that particular fluid has no nutritional nor sustaining value.  It is no wonder we feel like starving, needy children.  We have to get up off our knees and learn to stand up, here.

A shift toward re-consecrating our relationship to the Cosmic Mother through her earthly representative (Taurus) is what is being asked of us.  The rewards are great if we are able to let go of our current addictions to external power and begin fortifying ourselves with real substance:  Jupiter’s role and promise here.  This point is underlined on this day by Jupiter’s sextile relationship to that Neptune/Chiron conjunction.  The way through is to recognize the depth of our disconnection from, and our subsequent abuses of our divine female, and to come into an adult, honoring relationship of her and her powers.  Cleaning our polluted waters is part of the spiritual cleansing offered on this day.

The Triple Hit of the Jupiter/Pluto Trine 2011/2012

After the Grand Cross of June, 2010, Jupiter began making its way toward a trine with Pluto, entering that orb in June, 2011.  The Jupiter/Pluto trine has come to exact twice already, first on July 7, 2011 (another direct hit on our on-going Cardinal Cross as well on that day), and again on October 28, 2011. Its next direct station will occur on March 12, 2012, another Grand Trine in the Earth Signs amongst the exact same players I am detailing here, though in that one Venus will be added into the mix conjunct Jupiter.  Jupiter will move out of its trining orb in April, 2012, not to return again until 2015, when it shows up again as Pluto has progressed further along in his journey through the de-structuring of our outdated structures (at 13 degrees then).

Many such direct hits like this in a short period of time should grab our attention.  Jupiter is here intensively offering the benevolence of potential transformation into our higher selves (Sagittarius being its home base) to us if we do, in fact, sink into our darkest selves and do the work of self-discovery.  Jupiter’s soft and helping hands are critical opportunities to be taken in descending deep into the caverns of ourselves.  Venus entering conjunction with Jupiter in March will be tantamount to the good witch of the North casting extra special beauty stars on that upcoming grand trine.

The work at hand is about finding our own personal Gollum’s, of exploring the exact nature of our own evil and by finding the precise substance and shape of that evil – our personal “Precious” – which we all hold within.  And we do. All of us.  Every one. Trying to hide and deny it, as Frodo continually does throughout that epic, places us in the dangerous, hypnotic trance of its power.  This is, indeed, the place most americans inhabit.  We remain in that place of denial at the peril of losing our individual and collective lives.

It is easy to always take up the hero’s cloak and cast ourselves as the Aragons or Legolas’ or Gandolphs in our epic tales.  That has been our collective and individual mistake thus far, which is why we continue to inhabit the realms of the pre-adolescent and why the scaffolding of our culture is finally coming down.

Our job here is to take on a different kind of hero’s task:  to follow the trail of that hideous, hairless little creature, once a man (er, hobbit), now distorted into some grotesque, slinking shadow/wraith of his former self, rendered devoid of his former humanity out of his obsessed need to possess his “precious.”  Gollum fondles and fawns over it; crawls and skitters about on all fours, naked, dirty and indecent in his lust for a thing.  That thing of power, the one he has succumbed to, is the very thing that disempowers us.  That is what we have made of ourselves as a people, personally and collectively.

“As within, so without.”  We must conduct the exploration of ourselves – find the stuff of our own internal, ugly “precious” material – first.  What does our private picture of  Dorian Gray – the face of our personal Gollum – actually look like?  What is that thing we feel we cannot do without?  What is that thing we would kill for?  What is that thing that represents our own personal ring?  Whether is is a material thing or something more intangible (ego or fear of loss) it must be known within us.  Our external cultural/social/economic structures will alter all on its own once we have found our answers to those questions and detached our sense of identity from their fatal powers.  Jupiter offers herself during this time as our wise sage, our Gandolph the White, showing up at critical junctures to steer us true on the path to that higher self, as we pick our way through the dark,  endless and foggy bog on our journey into Mordor.  Those unable to recover themselves from the obsessions of their personal desires will, like Gollum, plunge to their death in reaching for it.  Those who learn its lessons will return to their homes, take up their humble tasks and go about the unglamourous and unannounced business of just being a decent human being, that much wiser in how precious a gift that state of being truly is.

IN CONCLUSION

Yes, a glorious grand trine awaits us on this master day.  But all points on it are earth bound.  No amount of adolescent fantasizing about avoiding its message will alter it.  Spiritual law dictates that we get to ascend, to experience the thrill of  initiation into the next level of enlightenment, only after we do our homework.  Contrary to our narcissistic ideas of ourselves, we have not even begun that homework.  This Master Number Day is an opportunity to start.

Some accuse me of being too harsh. Unvarnished truth is how others describe it. Here, I offer in response to that criticism, one of the only predictive statements from the Hopi Elders regarding our future.  They have said for a long time already that we are well past the 11th hour now and, should we fail to become aware of and correct our erroneous ways, this is our most likely fate:

“Humans shall wander the face of the earth forever, crawling like animals on all fours, without heads.”

On this day, after dawn has proved we have survived, some will still be sleeping off a hangover, some will bounce out of bed bright and chipper in anticipation of their celebratory afternoon hike, some will have remained awake all night, holding wide-eyed vigil against their own fears.  And, still others, just like every other morning on our planet, won’t wake up again at all.  No matter our personal orientations, the wheel of heaven continues to turn in her never-ending spiral, despite our best attempts to capture her undulations within the fragments of our science, man-made compasses, degrees of separation and loudly announced and highly anticipated nodal events.

Heaven Waves Her Wand

There is, indeed a cross, sitting up there above us as we awaken the morning after.  Sun in Scorpio sitting across from Jupiter in Taurus forms the horizontal/material plane line of time and space at that hour.  Mars in Leo in opposition to Neptune in Aquarius/Chiron in Pisces form the vertical, heavenly descending elements into whose energetics we can step and within which we can ground our mundane activities.

Whenever there is a cross at hand, I look first to its most vertical arm, as this is the cosmic, esoteric message that wants to channel down into our mundane plane: the “as above” part of Hermes’ famous quote.  The horizontal arm provides the guideposts along the way as to how we might manifest that divine message: the “so below” part of the equation.  Even within these different parts of the sphere, there is, yet again, an above and below, within and without conversation going on.

Reflecting on The Old

Mars in Leo in the heavens, Neptune (Aquarius)/Chiron (Pisces) camping out down by the home hearth, having a spirited argument across the large expanse of the cosmic poker table.  Now, if we were to use the conventional astrological interpretation of Mars in Leo, we would naturally say that the great lion in his ermine cape wants to charge forward into glorious conflict and battle, shining the light of his mane in the realms of public and communal affairs.  We might expect bold steps and likely conquests in these areas of activity or, possibly, the annoying cracklings of unanticipated consequences that accompany the overstepping of our bounds and the over-graspings of the burning , untamed ego (Sun/Lion).  Caution would be advised here, as the potential for the king to firmly establish himself in these realms is quite possible, as is the possibility to offend and alienate if he is too rigorous in clearing the table and taking possession of the throne.  The masculine Lion, accompanied by his masculine warrior, Mars, is asking us to pull the feminine attributes of emotion and woundedness (Neptune and Chiron on the earthly plane) into his ascendant position.

It is a reasonable interpretation of these symbols, if we satisfy ourselves with the vestigial symbols of what should be an extinct mind frame.  If we want to continue to use the two-dimensional, cardboard cutout image of the soldier holding up the shield as he charges headlong into the slings and arrows of the enemy as our paradigm for Mars, or the archetypal imperial king of the forest as our model for the Sun, we simply participate in trying to resuscitate the archaic and adolescent values of a patriarchal system whose narrative should have died with its ancient writers.

If we truly want a new human paradigm of experience to emerge, we must actually do it.  Our current archetypes were born out of a very specific culture with a very specific set of needs.  Needs whose validity and morality were always morally and ethically suspect to begin with.  Of course roman empire fell in a state of debauchery.  So, too now, is our own.  Archetypes are contextually bound, just like any marriage or life or theory of being.  Our entire human paradigm is asking to change, and we must alter our language to meet its needs.

Those astrologers who still use the myths of the old boy patriarchy in our linguistic road maps are, in fact, the very ones who are blocking the door to the potential new horizons of perception the end of the Mayan Calendar may offer us.  By continually rehashing these images in their old forms, using the same well-worn language, such modern soothsayers simply re-inforce and support the same structures from which they claim to want to free our imaginations.  As we all know with Pluto stationed in Capricorn, the old structures are falling.  The grammar and symbology of our description of ourselves must fall as well.  Besides, after thousands of years of using the old models, what do we have here?  Increasing injustice, increasing poverty and inequality, increasing domestic and public violence, increasing use of ever more deadly weapons and a burgeoning population of obese americans and northern hemisphereans who sit on their sofas watching the modern day version of the roman games:  football.  Keeping score on the political reds versus the blues doesn’t further the new paradigm, either.

If we let go of these truncated, worn out and flat stereotypes, a more interesting and subtle ability to feel into the dynamics of the heavens can emerge.  Let’s just dive in and start.

Mars as Androgyne: Reviving the Feminine Face of the Warrior

JeeJa in "Chocolate"

In the Chinese/Taoist tradition, the true warrior (our Mars) is the one who carries and is trained in the differential use of both the sword and the shield.   And, as it’s ancient saying goes, “one cannot use the sword and the shield at the same time.”  This saying means that conscious and definitive choices must be made in determining whether to use the yang warrior element (the sword) or the yin warrior element (the shield) in any given moment.  Every adult and integrated warrior, no matter the sex, must know and bring to bear to every situation the discernment and skill, acquired through years of practice, necessary to wield either one of these energies effectively.  Making the serious mistake of trying to use both at the same time leads to hesitation, confusion, unnecessary errors in judgement and wasted energy and bloodshed.

If one has discerned that the use of the sword is necessary (and in eastern traditions it is the choice of last resort), the warrior takes time to scan the field and find her mark.  Once correctly identified, she moves in with quickness and surety, and swiftly and precisely cuts off the opponent’s head; it is an action taken without emotion or attachment to the ego.  It is done cleanly and clearly, though it is never done, however, casually nor thoughtlessly.  Warriorship is a serious and solemn art, and is undertaken always with sobriety and complete self-awareness.  None of this infantile and medieval screaming and slashing and hacking in blind, uncontrolled rage and stupidity, nor rubbing others’ noses in your triumph just to gloat.

If the shield is the weapon of choice, it is wielded with the grace of the pirouetting ballerina or the circling matador;  the adept knows how to use the cover of trees, billowing laundry on a line or the intricate pathways through a night time meadow to move, conceal and protect the integrity of her warrior journey.  She dips and bows, recedes and disappears, traveling the circular road to her goal.  She is like the mother bear, leading the intruder away from her cubs. Cowering and mewling under the weight of the shield while the enemy bashes your brains in isn’t The Way here.  Neither are manipulations and gossip and the deliberate plantings of secrets and lies, as is common in western cultures.

As life is in a constant state of change and motion, the mature and clear use of the masculine and feminine elements involves engaging in an intimate dance, a constant exchange between the ever-shifting reality of yin turning into yang, turning into yin, turning into yang . . . turning, turning and turning again.  The practice of push hands in taoist martial arts is designed to entrain this kinesthetic/energetic knowledge into the sensient body/mind organism.  We always hope that organism is human.  This exercise captures and transmits to the student the non-mental sensing into the external and internal chi forces moving into and out of our field of experience, encouraging responsiveness, flexibility and adaptability within the cosmic and relational environment.

On one level, it is the way to learn to finesse our relationship with our very real and physical partner, on another it is the esoteric doorway into metaphysical understanding of the rich wisdom and suppleness of the heavens.  It is only when we let go of our fears (and we have so many hidden in every joint, in every organ and in every laugh line etched upon our faces), that we learn to move with our partner and the universe, summoning the courage to remain in contact with whatever movements and gyrations they may try to throw our way.  Ultimately, once the stiffness of fear is finally dissipated (and it does take many years to find all the little places it is hiding in us) it becomes fun and wicked and juicy to let go into that place of pure feeling and sensing.  Any great dojo should be filled with the sounds of laughter.  This is the true heart and soul of Tantra.  It is also the heart and soul of Neptune, that flowing beauty that plunges and purls, ripples and falls, winds and gurgles her way through the undertow of our lives.

No matter the object of its application, the art of the warrior requires the ability to shape shift at will, to master the feminine and masculine faces of the divine.

Our modern day grapplings in the mud pits and boxing rings of our politics and class issues, our football fields and community council meetings, our executive boardrooms and private bedrooms are, well, the culmination of our crude and barbarian stories told over centuries, full of lots of drama, yes, but effecting mostly nothing.  Certainly not change of any sort.  Certainly not anything close to grace.

Reviewing Mars in Leo

So, now we have our fully integrated warrior, Mars, walking along in the heavens with the current energy of a lion, wanting to go about things in a particularly leonine way.  But,  just as Mars now has two faces, so does our wild animal.  What kind of  tone does this lion have?  Is it the energy of the singular rogue male seeking or sitting on the throne, or is it the female one, the leader of the pride, the one who establishes complex social networks among her charges, the other pride females, and their progeny?  Is she organizing her women to go out on a night time hunt, or circling the pack to fend off a marauding gang of hyenas?  Is she watching with sorrow the new male kill her young cubs sired by the old king?  Is this a warrior grieving the loss of her comrades, is it one searching for similar souls in order to approach a new found treasure?  What kind of warrior lion do we have here, really?

Well, we don’t know.  Until we begin the process of creative conversation born out of contextual relationships.  That would be the process at which western civilization has entirely failed,  In so doing, it has also failed its people in preparing for a truly new paradigm, one which we can only dive into ourselves and begin speaking through new mythologies and new structures of perceiving our archetypes.  Perhaps that is the end we are to experience, and the new to which we will awaken.

It requires the capacity to move slowly through complexities, conducted within intimate communities and to await the signals that allow us to see into the truth of a situation and to come to know the wise way to act in accordance with its demands, not ours.

Our Mars in our story here is in the later stages of Leo (23 degrees) and is an older warrior now on this particular path.  This is the Queen Elizabeth I type, or perhaps the aging actor, who’s patience for the grandiosities and intrigues of the court and stage are waning.  At this stage in life, such warriors and nobles become the sages and tradition-holders for the next generation.  As those also old enough to know the ingress into this part of human experience, the pretenses of appearance give way to the development of depth within and the review of the crusades we once lead.

Answering the call for internal meaning in this chart, are Neptune and Chiron anchoring the warrior monarch into the realms of emotional meaning and the reflection upon old wounds by the home fires.  Chiron is still right at the surface (0 degrees Pisces) and is still gazing at her own reflection.  That is fine, as we all have plenty of time for the thorough exploration of the undersea world of full of sunken ships and treasures.  We will, indeed, have to fully immerse ourselves in the long-buried hurts and unfulfilled needs suffered at the hands of a culture drunk with centuries of its desire for power, leaving pillaging and plunder and rape in its wake (those would be Chiron’s brothers, the Centaurs).  There are a lot of bodies down there in those maritime wrecks and ours is to understand them both at our personal, microcosmic level and our collective, macrocosmic one as well.  Our very own is one of the bodies, floating in the dark. The day we come upon her is a shocking one and it is helpful to know this in advance.  Where we are right now is just dipping our toes in the water.

Chiron is also the representative of Karmic Law.  She knows all of our wounds intimately and writes them in the book of days.  No story is lost, not a single scar forgotten.  Part of her job is to take us all into Davy’s Locker, to find the many debts we have accumulated, the hearts we have ripped out and left wanting and oppressed over eons of our piracies.  That task can be overwhelming and it is best to simply start with a review of how we have hurt and wounded others, mild ones for now, for they are inextricably linked to our own.  We can learn over time through the exercise that the driving of the sword through another’s heart ultimately pierces our own.   Karma is not just a ledger, it is also a mirror.  Ours is to develop reflexive recognition and compassion for our collective dilemma.

Neptune is on a reflective retrograde of thoughtfulness in Aquarius, readying herself to plunge more deeply into the waters of emotion and spirit over the next seven years.  Right now, Neptune asks us to begin the process of turning over the effects and consequences of actions formulated in the mental realms and asserted through the will (Aquarius).   The awakening of the brain to its own machinations, however distorted we will certainly find them to be, is the first step in achieving mental clarity.  They are, in fact, extremely distorted and artificial machinations.  Because we are a society addicted to seeking refuge and safety from fear in our brain functions to such a high degree, it is here that Neptune is exerting her powers at dissolving and washing away the defensive mechanisms we have so cleverly constructed there.  Remember that Neptune is also the ruler of addictions and it is the addiction to our brains we must give up. That can be very scary business and it is important to remind ourselves that we are not becoming psychotic.  We are, in fact, recovering from our cultural psychotic thought processes.  Finding a new way of functioning inside of such a culture can, indeed, make us feel personally crazy.  This feeling, however, is nothing more than the normal symptoms of a necessary detoxification process.

You will survive the shakes and quakes and breakdowns it entails.  And it does entail those very things.  It is critically important to have trustworthy friends who can simply sit and listen to where you are within the process, preferably ones who have already freed themselves from it.  Do not spend time with people still actively involved in that cultural psychosis.  Getting on the mental clarity wagon, as in freeing ourselves from any cycle of addiction, is critical.  Unlike alcohol or another external object, however, this one isn’t a “thing” somewhere “out there.”  This one is in you, in all of us, culturally infused and re-inforced at the cellular level, and so the journey out of it is far more difficult.  So is finding others who are not infected with this deeply entrenched disease.  We will all spend the rest of our lifetimes ridding it from ourselves.  I do assure you, however, that you will find yourself at some point, laughing at your own previous, insane behaviors and be able to say, “Oh my, what was I thinking.”  Not much.  But now you are.

As Neptune moves into Pisces, we will all have a similar feeling of fear and loss of control and emotional psychosis as we confront the feeling level machinations we invented and complicated our lives with at the direction of our toxic mental faculties.  If we have gone through the work of breaking down the structures of our culturally-induced mental illness during the Neptune Aquarian phase, we will be much more prepared and able to work through the breakdown and reformulation of our emotional structures through the Neptune Piscean phase.  Pluto (structure/secrets) trine Jupiter (benevolence) is currently in attendance here and this aspect lends itself well to rolling up our sleeves, digging in and pulling down those old scaffoldings ourselves.  With abundant Jupiter in this mix, we have a far greater than average possibility of success in these endeavors.

The Sun/Jupiter Axis of the Cross

Here is our Lion again, now fully formed as the object, The Sun.  And she’s in Scorpio, the sign of sexual desires, the occult and our hidden terrain.  This Lion wants to sneak around in the dark, on the hunt for prey.  That can make for lots of trouble, if the heart isn’t grounded and motivated by nobler causes.  Fortunately, opposing Jupiter provides the voice of such nobler motivations.  Our benevolent planet of abundance and luck is here rooted in the vibrations of Taurus, which will place a softer, more nurturing and slower spin on our slinking felines nocturnal activities.  This lion could be any kind from a rutting male looking for a quickie to a female planning a raid on a warthog’s nest.  The itch for intrigue, however, will be high.  The ploughing docility of the ox, however, will prevent Jupiter, which can have a tendency to go over the top in exuberance, from taking anything here too far.

This axis asks us to balance out our ego needs for fulfillment of desire with the careful planning of how to spread the seeds of Jupiter’s gifts over a wider land.  The personal identity is locked in conflict with the ecological body of the mother here, and our particular times, as we all know, demand we begin to collectively bow to the needs of the latter.   Here, the Lion may find expression in her female manifestation, lending her care and royalty to the preservation of our lands.  The Sun trine Neptune/Chiron is also lending support for the Lion to shine his or her light upon the greater good of the whole and engaging in the work of healing, rather than focussing on the material and psychic baubles we may secretly lust after.  Jupiter sextile Neptune/Chiron further anchors the argument in bending to the needs of the collective as the Lion’s way to greatness.  Jupiter is lending his beneficial influences to exploring the watery depths of our collective unconscious, which is in dire need of a paradigm shift.  Yielding to the watery and earth elementals is the Lion’s path right now.  The Moon in Sagittarius also gives the chart a lift in setting the sights of our most heartfelt desires on the higher plane of spiritual goals and attainment.

Finally, there is the Pluto/Uranus square, demanding discontentments and shake ups in our underworld.  Uranus in Aries usually gives rise to quite fiery uprisings, whether in the personal or global arena.  This is the necessary tremors of stirring the necessary ingredients for the change we are all asking for.  The ground does need to shift under our feet in order for our planet to give us a new landscape within which to fulfill ourselves.  I nice practice place is a subway or commuter train.  Practice standing and moving to its motions without hold on.  At first, it is tough, but after awhile one learns how to feel into the ground below and simply ride the train like a surfboard.

Good morning, then, in advance.  And I hope all of you had a lovely evening last night.

Here we are, in the final days of the end of an ancient, indigenous calendar, at least in the calculated view of a north american white male who decided that his  new and improved interpretation of another culture’s work is, of course, the correct one.  Because it’s “real science” of course, sifted and purified by the sieves and structures of mathematical equations and derivations scratched out on blank sheets of white paper and mental somersaults conducted inside square rooms full of volumes of similar mental chatter.  It’s the story of the cowboys versus the indians, once again.

Have you ever noticed, though, how noisy those hatted dudes are atop their snorting, saddled horses, firing their pistols all over creation for no reason, stumbling out of the saloon, zipping up their pants?  The indians always ride bareback, heads low and close to the napes of their striding, sacred animals, streaming hair whispering in the wind.  Their gut-ripping war cries drown out the drunken belches of their of their pot-bellied enemies.  And they always get the jump on the snoring cowpokes in the silent ambush scene, do you ever notice that, too?  Why is that?  And why is it that the more skilled and competent get slaughtered anyway?

If the retrospective view of the recent non-event of Comet Elenin taught us anything at all, it should be the lesson that the jumping jacks of the chattering, rational, left-brained folks can, and do, do nothing to alter the course of the quixotic mysteries of our universe.  She has her own mind, her own bag of and sensibilities for the use of trickery and craft.  And, she’s always one step ahead of the slow and pedantic brains of man, undulating through and between our thought processes.  These new-aged, staged competitions of superiority of “who knows the correct date,” like those old westerns, are always written to favor the writers, where the teeming masses of “heathens” end out massacred under the civilized hand of the authors and the spray of the gattling guns of their soldier counterparts.

These current knicker twistings and suspender snappings of the allegedly educated and erudite of our species are, in fact, just pitiful posturings of impotent people in desperate need of trying to control that which will never break under the straps of their harness.  It is one thing to get on and ride a horse, it is an entirely different one to become so at one with such a creature that her human partner feels into every subtle change of tone in her muscles and her breath, changing and moving and feeling in time to her rhythms with every step she takes.

Surrender To Dorothy

Those standing on their soapboxes constructed on the artifacts and sacred texts of far more ancient cultures are the snake oil salesmen, the wizards of duh, the don quixotes and the whining woody allens of our collective unconscious.

 Those who give them audience and money are the adolescent Dorothys in aprons in all of us.  Some will also find themselves reflected in her cohorts on the road of vulnerability, trust, shame and ultimate enlightenment: the Tin Man (the heart, The Scarecrow (the mind) and The Lion (the ability to act when the previous two are intact).  They are the representatives of the different parts of us we are willing to open to others in our search for the truth.  Before her transformation into the young woman of wisdom and insight she becomes at the conclusion of the long journey, the girl Dorothy and her pals must wander in the frightening land of manipulations and misdirections, misuses and abuses of their hopes and fears and dreams confabulated by a man who simply cannot accept he is just a man, full of sound and fury, frenetically pulling his magic show levers, who, ultimately, is possessed of nothing more than a common basket and balloon.

The metaphor of Dorothy’s journey into the funhouse of that bizarre patriarchal reality, the twister that lifts her entire house (structure) and hurls her into a dizzying new world of sophisticated, adult secrets and lies, is ours to live here, in our present time.  It is useful to notice that many of the group’s body movements in that film involve sudden stops, stunned expressions of surprise, tripping over others, stepping on tails and toes, robotic gestures and backing into the wrong trees.  It is a Laurel and Hardy routine and represents the state of confusion and disorientation often experienced by those on the verge of their own awakening from the psychosis of a diseased culture.  Like Dorothy and her friends, they twitch and jerk in the face of the artificially constructed concerns and hidden fears of a contemporary culture which is, at its core, pathologically addicted to power (the collective antidote to its collective terrors).  It will pursue that power, even if it has to stoop to abusing children to get it.  There is nothing wrong with the apparent epileptic here, nor in Dorothy’s collective gang of parkinsonian movements.  These symptoms are all simply correct kinesthetic and emotional responses to the hidden agendas and irrational mental twists and turns of those in whom they have mistakenly placed their vulnerabilities and trust.

The truth tellers in that fairy tale turn out to be both representatives of the wild and untamable world of nature (though distinctly domesticated in the film to tone down the volume):  Toto, the dog (The Revealer of Lies) and Glinda, The Good Witch of the North (The Bestower of Awareness).  The beauty in this tale is that that abiding, feminine wisdom is always there, always has been, just waiting for Dorothy and us to recognize her magic, to turn toward her radiance, to finally surrender to the effects of her enlightening wand.  And, in that discovery of the permanent, though often hidden, presence of the divine female, we find our own internal and inextinguishable power necessary to traverse our own uncertain times. With the appearance of the good witch, Dorothy’s jerky, adolescent awkwardness vanishes.  The intimate bond with nature (Dorothy’s relationship with Toto throughout) and the descent of female grace from the heavens, gives rise to Dorothy’s own step into her own grace and power.  The Witch also gives her gift of generosity: the gift of telling Dorothy that that power always belonged to her alone. The moment we give it away to external sources is the moment we get lost in the forest.  In just the same way that Dorothy herself must summon the will to take herself home (the objects of the masculine, the basket and balloon, have no power until the wisdom of the feminine, Dorothy, steps into it), we must click our own heels, whisper our own incantations of personal magic to ourselves and gaze inward in complete faith and trust.  Only then can we recognize the sacred spiral dance inside of which we have always been turning.

The story of Dorothy, of spiraling into and out of her dream of awakening, is a shaman’s initiation journey.  It is no accident that almost every eastern and indigenous spiritual philosophy, at its highest and most esoteric level, emulates and embodies the spinning of the cosmos as the path to self awareness as well.  From sufism to taoism to native americanism, the student/seeker is taught to find her center through the literal, physical exercise of turning upon the wheel of life.  Whether walking the sacred ba gua, dancing the Chumash Long Dance around a central fire all through the night, or whirling around the axis formed through the ball of a single foot as the dervishes do, we learn to let the dizzying, external world of illusion fall away and allow ourselves to be taken in to the great, oceanic and cosmic nautilus of infinity, pulling us in and pushing us out again in the constant exchange of tidal breath between birth and death.

How We Get There

The truth is we do need our fairy tales and winding trails and goblins and false gurus.  We need our campfires and ghost stories, our boogie men under the bed, our mad professors, our snake oil salesmen.  And, yes, we need our elenins and plutos and indigenous and gregorian calendars, too.  We need to spin our yarns, as it were.  These stories are all, equally, the stuff of the journey, offering us the experiences we need to come to know and trust our own inner terrain, the voice of ourselves that answers to no one and nothing but what we know gazing into the flames of our own hearth fires.  Once the echoes of our mental cogitations are burned away, once we disengage from the blur of daily life, what is left in the dark catacombs of our own mother wombs?  There’s  no place like home.

In these latter days of our current trials and tribulations, surrounded by the multitudes of predictors and proselytizers of potential salvations, amongst the scaffoldings and edifices of intellect, through the jungles of mud and rains of asteroids, we learn to make our own choices, which give us the narrative of our own, unique lives, the shapes and shadows of the furniture and photos in our own homes. Lives never to be lived again, homes left uninhabited when the divine determines.  All our stories do stop with a final period.  There is a “the end,” floating on a black background at the end of our personal film reels, an “amen” at the close of our funeral service, after which our beloveds file out into the sunshine to continue writing the lines of their own stories.

Choice is the only thing we have.  And ours to make really are far more simple than civilization and the allegedly civilized want us to believe.  Our task is to see through the costumes and curtains of those gyrating images and to settle in to the eternal place that lies beyond the studio world of the daily show.

So, as we approach the next youtube/myface/herboob event in our uncertain voyage: the cessation of the tuns and baktuns, the alleged end of the days and nights and the seedings and fruitions on the wheel of fortune, what’s it going to be?  Are we going to place our faith of the exact date in a contemporarily left-brained, synaptically truncated scientist whose writings and calculations and diagrams began less than two decades ago, or the hieroglyphs and mesmerizing drawings of a people and culture who developed their intelligence and sensibilities of rhythmic reason in relationship with the Mother over thousands of years?  Shall we sit in awe (and pay) to watch our modern cowboys, our wizards of duh, scratch and scribble their drawings on the blackboard?  Shall we dabble in their babble? Or, hop in our own balloons – find the door that leads out into the sunlit fields full of masters skilled enough to teach us how to read the braille of the Mother’s ancient texts hidden in the abundant hedges and corn rows, bubbling springs and stone escarpments that lie upon her vast and open belly?

Whose sensitivities will we invite to guide us through this new dream and our new landscapes. Whose presence will we ask to listen in to the deepest hopes and fears of the sleepy murmurings of our own open heart?  For whom will we turn back the covers of our bed – for boys who have spent their daytime hours manipulating and sharpening their pencils and tongues in the sterile cubicles of their own brains, or for those who have spent millenia understanding the wheel of the cosmos and turning the soils of the earth and all the fruits of her creation within their supple minds and hands?  Whose fingertips shall we allow to trace the contours of the body and blood of the infinite, cosmic feminine that lie so deeply within our own?

I know who I’m going to pull back the covers for.  The one that smells of wood and clean sweat earned from real work, who is perfumed with the odors of the turned pages of papyrus scrolls and sage smoke and apples fermenting under trees.

Chalk dust,laminated desks and leaking ball point pens have their place and uses, but they have never stimulated any of my imaginative activities.  The wielders of these flaccid instruments, the sitters at these toxic podiums, should neither be allowed to lead any scouting parties into nor establish any command posts in our collective future.

Smart boys and girls belong in the classroom, solving their brain twisters; wise men and women belong on the horses, exploring the mysteries of our new frontiers.

Answering the Call to the Hero’s Journey

I have finally landed on the other side – released the “pause button,” as it were, though the landing and becoming have required sufficient time and space to find each other and form the beginning steps of the dance of the narrative they are meant to create together.  I am now five weeks into a vision quest I decided to take because, well, vision questing has been the overall narrative of my life thus far and I found myself needing, once again, to acquiesce to its seemingly irrational rhyme and reason.  Such calls to meanderings have, and continue to, confound me, though the unwrapping of their gifts and treasures I know always lasts far into future . . . most often into lifetimes.

Sometimes, the impulse toward growth and change can be found in objects and appearances as mundane as a bottle of seltzer water.  You know, the one you opened a several days ago, set down somewhere and forgot about during the busyness of life.   Somewhere in one of the ever more brief gaps between grocery shopping, changing the oil in the car, paying the rent and dashing off to the job that pays for all of these daily maintenance things (it’s expensive to be alive these days), a small pause opens.  In that moment, a bit weary at the end of the day, you rest your chin on the table, eye-level now with that suddenly re-discovered bottle sitting across from you.  Slowly, its familiar shape and form come into focus and you begin to gaze reflectively into its container.  A personal scrying bowl, as it were, presented for contemplation, straight from the local supermarket.  You notice then, from this new vantage point, that the multitude of bubbles it had at first opening has dissipated over time and you start to wonder if the whole thing has gone completely flat.  Sigh.  Hhhhmmm. Time to stand up, grasp it firmly in hand, give it a good, vigorous shake and see if she’s still got some fizz left in her.

Though american and european cultures conventionally cast males as the heroes of our stories, as the sole possessors of some deep need to prove themselves, to strike out on adventures, to place themselves in positions of testing their mettle, of summoning the guts and courage to walk into the unknown, these are actually sexless activities.  There is, indeed, nothing particularly masculine about seeking to know the Self – boys and men just tend to be a lot more needy of attention for their efforts and, thus, theirs are the noisy stories they write and edit and publish and the ones we end out reading.  And, besides, the boys usually burn all the books by and about girls and women and indigenous peoples as the heroes and warriors that they, too, have always been.  Except, of course, the ones where they are consigned to the parts of the girlfriend, whore, helpmate or servant.

Out here, though, beyond the constraints of the conventional thought processes of the limited, western, rational and disconnected brain, there are many warrior wanderers of all genders (do you really think there are just two?), shapes and sizes, ilks and bilks, whose purpose, through the practice and process of journeying, is to come to know the intimate undulations of our private, internal landscapes.  How one makes the journey is key to the final outcome – the end result, the narrative told, the last things we think of on our deathbeds – of such travel.

Some travel for fun and the accumulation of snapshots, others to explore internal and external geographies they’ve never known before.  It is, indeed, the hopes, desires and passions of the true journey man or woman, that push them out beyond the boundaries of the village and pre-packaged tours in search of that primal spring that gives us life.  Her babblings and gurglings awake us from midnight dreaming, her effervescence flowing up from dark regions, searching for air and rain and light.  Her surfacing bloops and fizzles and foams and the scent of her ionic breath calls us to the path – yes, the very one through the woods and over the dales to somebody else’s land we go.  We do honor the dead, both past and future, when we take up the pilgrim’s staff and step out onto nature’s thoroughfares, as so many have done before.

The Wanderer as Embodiment of Cosmic Mind

 The only requirement to donning and stepping out in the wayfarer’s clothes is the one we all have the power to summon: to seek that within ourselves which we do not already know.  There are those who theorize that the Big Bang, the equivalent of the impulse for the Wu Chi to suddenly, without any apparent reason or preamble, divide itself into the Tai Chi, was caused by the need of the Cosmic Mind to come to know itself.  Undifferentiated space and time (The One)  spontaneously and incomprehensibly, differentiated itself (The Two).  That insouciant, bold flinging of the divine hand out into the darkness and subsequent striking of the anvil of vital duality, birthed “the 10,000 things,” the myriad of forms we are able to sense with all of our current faculties in the world around us.  Like the multitude of sparks flying off a roman candle, the hands of the divine have been raining down the lights of her creation ever since that moment.  The real scope and reach and varieties of those forms is still far out of our conceptual range, woefully limited as our human brains still are.  That Mind is still out there dancing with her sparklers, waving them to and fro, near and nether in many regions that still lie beyond the furthest furthest places our biggest biggest telescopes can see.  The strange and inexplicable expansions and contractions of the universe we know are caused by her ecstatic and rhythmic breathing as she twirls and spins and runs through her interstellar studio.

The invention of the relationship between self and other, of yin and yang, of shakti and shiva, matter and anti-matter, was the Universe’s own crying out to know itself in relationship to a something else.  A singularity cannot know anything of itself and the creation of the alien became necessary for consciousness, first Cosmic and much, much later, Planetary, to emerge out of the void.  The intelligence of that Cosmic Mind infuses all things, is contained in every muon and particle, every gamma ray and wave form that issued forth from that original moment of birth of brilliant duality.  Every organic and inorganic entity in existence contains the essence of that intelligence, despite science’s and religion’s best efforts and arguments to convince us all of their limited and truncated views of what it means to be sentient.   In spite of theirs and ours refusal to recognize her presence, The Cosmic Mind resides in every crystalline matrix of every stone, every molecule of DNA and in every fiber of the woven blanket we throw around our shoulders at night as we warm ourselves by the fire.

The hero on the journey seeks an intimate relationship, through guts and wits, through the irrational twists and turns of the path through their own forests and meadows and mountaintops, the shape and feeling of that irrational Cosmic Mind, upon whose Body we lightly tread.

Running the Gauntlet to the Wayfarer’s Road

or 

Just Try to Get the Hell Out of Dodge These Days

Prior to our techno-jammed world of cell phones, e-mails, skype, and social networks – the artificial ropes and burdens of instant gratifications and dramas, such journeys were easy.  They required nothing more than the packing of a bag and the purchase of bus ticket or the turning of the key in that old camper van and a wave to friends and family who supported the hero’s journey.  Prior to that, it was the slinging of a stick packed with the minimal necessities over one’s shoulder and stepping out our front door.  Today, the obstacles to a walkabout in the unknown have multiplied like rabbits in a small hutch and the effort just to unplug takes up a large portion of just making it out onto the road, let alone in getting beyond the familiar streetlights and parking lots that blind the way at every intersection and corner.

While the concrete avenues and steel tracks of trolley cars have bound us in their grids of law-abiding flows and movements, Facebook and Twitter and the other “netwit” groups have become the psychic grappling hooks in the backs and spirits of human flesh and bone, overflowing as they are with dis-embodied,  fragmented advice, vacuous commentary and trivial, self-induced crises that insist upon our immediate attention, poisoning and binding the human spirit in vast cattle pens of chatter.

The allegedly educated, mature and erudite of our acquaintances prove themselves actually quite unable to sit through even a day’s absence on the experiential GPS grid of life without firing e-mails at our receding silhouettes in the setting sun:  are you okay? where are you? how’s it going? should i throw out this piece of junk mail or save it for you? where should I put that t-shirt you left behind? did you like the color I dyed my hair last time? cuz  i’m thinking of doing it again, what do you think? gee, I lost the keys to your car and federal law requires you to identify yourself to the locksmith on skype so he can make a copy.  i might just have to tow it into the river and dump it if you don’t respond immediately, you know. (yes, power succubus) oh, yeah, i really think you need to read this book and that guide so you know how to be safe out there.   (Yeth, mummy). Oh, yes, and, of course, my PhD outranks your Master’s degree, so bow to my authority – and here’s my thesis I wrote 40 years ago, so tag me when you’ve read it thoroughly. (Yeth, doctor).

Gosh, and I haven’t even unwrapped my bread and cheese for breakfast after my first night away from home.

Dodging these metaphoric communications of fear and loathing in letting go into the unknown and unknowable (or allowing space for others to do so) are like running serpentine patterns through the rain of arrows fired from the escarpments of medieval castles.  The higher the density and intensity of weaponry, the greater the terror is of those hiding behind those stone walls.  Nothing for the adventurer to do but hunker down behind the boulders until the guards at the gates fall asleep.

Finding the Real Along on The Way

 Our true friends, however, our comrades in sandals on life’s journey, are the one’s who remain in utter silence, pose not a single question, nor proffer a word of advice, nor use our possessions to try to hold us hostage to their whims.  They demand no obeisance nor tethered thoughts to them as we pick our way through the bramble bushes of our travels.  Their trust in us is so holy complete they can let us go easily, letting us decide when to take up the slack in the line and find our way home again to their hearth.

They are the ones we entrust to slit open the envelopes of our personal missives by the evening fire and gaze upon our hand written notes sent by earth-bound messengers along wagon wheel ruts through the high plains.  They smile in recognition as they read our pathetically small scratch marks on the page, then tuck those precious leaves in between their wine glass and candle for safe keeping as they savor their evening meal.  These are those who simply open the door and let us in, who say nothing while they make us a cup of tea as we settle into the sofa at journey’s end.  They do this because they know the wanderer wanders for all of us, that we dream the world alive as our friends dream us, that no part of the hero’s journey is separate from any of our own internal tales of magic and daring and thrill of sleeping under the stars.  They know the soul of the quest is in finding our true heart’s desire and, having already found their own, they celebrate its manifest destiny in the soles of our dusty shoes standing in their mud room.

The unspeakable and the silent are our mutual friends.

 Back to Breaking Out of the Fence

 The masters of cyberspace have done nothing more than construct an artificial intelligence force field around the populace, bent on trying to corral and control time and space and human activity, directing and spiraling human experience and conversation into collection drains of cyborgian waste.

Rather than ooh and aah over the billionaire statuses of the founders of these byte and bit companies and their brightly-lit, pixilated communities traipsing around inside gargantuan flat screen monitors, we should perceive what these folks and their followers really are – just small children with shiny tinker toys who are terribly, terribly, deeply and woefully afraid of the dark.  Self-described “computer geeks and nerds,” they reveal, in their fantasy land of cabled networks, only their own soulless limitations, creating sand boxes full of distorted voices and pictures, tags and undecipherable and meaningless strings of letters  designed to cram human experience inside the arid sentence structures and empty terrain of their own emotional, relational and spiritual flatlands.

Like sheep guided by the barks and nips of the smart, hyperactive, highly trainable and trained border collies, the sheep of our species allow these literal and figurative cyberdogs to startle, dazzle and herd them into running down the narrow chutes of “like,” “tweet,” “share,” and “spam” buttons, straight on into the slaughterhouse of human creativity and wisdom.

Our ecstasies and eroticisms, passions and wants for something larger than ourselves lie in the instinctual viscera of our bellies, in the hunger of the flesh and spirit.  Our satisfaction for the taste and feel of the juice of a ripe peach running down our chins has been replaced with the insensate offerings of different templates to choose and use for a blog site.  Our glorious personal views and experiences of sunrises and cultivated roses that prick our thumbs as we trim them have given way to a liquid screen full of pop-ups and scrolling banners and synthesized sounds and color wheels.

As a collective, we need to recognize our sensual world is being gutted like a dead fish before our metamorphosis into the myopic, dry, talking heads of the wizards of cyber-oz is complete.  There is no “there” in cyberspace.  Nothing real takes place in those memory chips. It does not exist.  Even Toto knew that.

Dodge, Duck and Roll:

Weaving Our Way to the Exit Door

 Trying to free one’s self from the intricate web of illusion these stunted adolescents and their financial backers have woven around the human spirit of imagination, adventure and freedom (that faraway land of magic and alchemy, of trust in the self and our own discernment, of the awe in the vast power of nature and the cosmos) is like trying to get out of downtown Manhattan late on a Friday afternoon.  The greater the obstacles, however, the greater humanity’s need is for its escapees into the hinterlands.  And the greater the determination the wanderer must summon to firmly grasp and follow the desires of the still living and breathing human heart.

At some point, the true wayfarer knows when to open the door of the taxi, collect her bags from the trunk, kick the door closed and weave her way on foot through the noisy, thronging traffic jams and on out into the hills.

The artful dodger is our archetypal leader here, bobbing and twirling through the thickening cloud and din of infocuffs.  Ours is to follow The Way.  No exchanging finger salutes with other cabbies, no stopping for the financial exec whose just dropped his droidberryithingy in the sewer drain and is now demanding immediate assistance for its retrieval.  Sorry, no helping hand to the 4-year-old whose ice cream cone just hit the hot pavement.  And, no cursing the bike messenger for driving over your foot, either.

An unmovable and unshakeable eye on those soft green hills is required.  Such a gaze allows for the development of the equipoise and grace found in the responsive, quick movements of the martial artist/artful dodger/shape shifter amidst the lowing cattle that jostle and hurry along.  Flexibility and adaptability in moving with the flow of the crowd, just like water, allows us the opportunity to see and know where the eddies and rapids are, and to make our way in and around and through them with the ease and certainty of our direction.  Masters do not ambulate, they glide.

Head up and to the horizon.  And do make haste.  For it is only out there, in the distant mists and fogs of flesh and blood and bone, of roots and dark earth and lichen-covered stones, that the true spirit of our own, and our collective, human potential can be re-discovered, revived and re-consecrated, and, hopefully, allowed to thrive once again.

So, we have lived through the exercise of learning how to live with The Way, that very elusive and esoteric Taoist state of entrusting ourselves to ourselves and the uncertain and constant mysteries of the Cosmos. Nothing is lost in such an exercise.  It is, in fact,  a very worthwhile journey we have all taken together in learning to listen to our own internal voice and following it, no matter what it was any one of us chose to do in the face of it.

Welcome to our post-Elenin world reality. Regardless of the final outcome here, it has, indeed, energetically altered all of us in the ways we needed.  Reflection on what this event meant to you and the discoveries you have made now on the other side of it is well worth the effort.  Such nodal points, whether real, imaginary or simply anxiously anticipated, allow us to scratch ever deeper below the surface of what we think we know of ourselves and the world around us.

In light.
sistertongue

A focus on the third eye, altered states of consciousness, dreams, non-left brain communications and kinesthetic wisdom would be the best use of this triumvirate’s energies. On the practical, mercurial level, run, dance, hike, swim, meditate – whatever it is you do to stimulate creative flow as far away from limited, conventional forms of doing things (stop surfing the internet and get out into the real, wet surf) is the way to go about this period of time. Remember that Mercury is currently grounded into an earth sign (not its favorite spot) and that that fact alone will slow things down. Virgo is, of course, the seeker of perfection and a bit of overdoing in the name of such perfectionism may be one of the potentials here, particularly with grand Jupiter in the trining mix. Go for it, but don’t be surprised if you end out with a bit of mud in your eye (which is always the antidote to a perfectionist).

Reorganizing or renovating the home hearth and casting off the unnecessary is also a lovely way to dip into the Mercury/Virgo match. The main point is to let go of the rational elements of the brain and muse and wander through the imagination, picking up and looking at old artifacts and deciding which to keep and which to donate to charity (Virgo’s service to others), in the same way one would go through one’s wardrobe and hand off that which has not been used in the past year. Be responsible and cleanse your psychic and physical belongings before passing them on for better use. With both Pluto and Jupiter in retrograde, the reflective, reviewing aspect will be key. If this all sounds a bit schizophrenic, it is. Doing and reflecting are the paradoxes to be mastered here. With Jupiter in the 10 degree of of Taurus, the sabian instruction here is to let go of some of our personal chatchke’s in order to partake in a larger vision of compassion, altruism and service to the Whole of humanity. That activity will bear further fruit as Jupiter continues its retrograde into the 9th degree of Taurus, which reads: “A fully decorated Christmas tree.” (Rhudyar, 1973). That tree is an internal one and it is a good time to count the intangible gifts we have received. The external trees in the metaphor are barren in the midst of the winter season. Look inward.

As all three planets are all now touching off in the earth signs, many internal gains can be made in altering the structures of one’s daily life in order to provide a more grounded foundation from which to conduct one’s future. Occurring here during the transitional late Summer, early Fall season, when all of nature is in flux and alteration during the change from full yang season, (Summer and its fullness at Solstice) to the contemplative time of the yin (culminating in the Winter Solstice), there are new cornerstones we can lay in as we begin our descent into Autumn and the ultimate darkness of Winter and plumb the depths of those new roots. Ritual objects and blessings can be poured into the new cement and cured over time. Think of them as time capsules, full of the mementoes and wishes we wish to come to fruition as the new edifice is built. The preparations we make now will serve us well seasonally as we begin to make our way below ground and adjust our senses to a less luminous world. They will also serve us well far into the future as we lay brick upon brick of our new spiritual homes, keeping time with the larger structural renovations that will be had as our economic/social/cultural paradigms shift (that Grand Cross of 2010, which began the deconstruction period of what we have known as america).

As we know, Pluto in Capricorn is the combination for uncovering secrets, power, clandestine activities and nefarious pursuits. Our Grand Cross of 2010 (Saturn, Pluto and Jupiter/Uranus) has now given way to the tides of change and transformed into a Pluto/Jupiter trine. The great god of luck and abundance now offers a more harmonious relationship with the god of darkness and the underworld realm. It is here possible to harness the expansive luck of Jupiter in summoning courage to shine the light upon our deepest and most secretly held beliefs and emotions. And, Jupiter’s influence allows us to realize the higher good of community we can serve if we engage that personal courage in relating to Pluto. Strikingly enough, at 4 degrees Capricorn, Pluto’s sabian message reads: “A group of people outfitting a large canoe at the start of a journey by water.” Rudhyar’s interpretation of this placement is that we have the ability to use natural resources and basic skills in order to achieve a group purpose. The reference to a journey by water alludes to the semi-sextile placement of the Neptune/Chiron conjunction (which is straddling the mental/emotional realms – Neptune in Aquarius and Chiron in Pisces), which guides us more directly into the emotional realm of our deeply held wounds. The individual healing of those wounds will allow us to find our commonality with the trauma of humanity, transcending our personal experience and restructuring our thought processes toward ourselves and our larger community.

Uranus, that explosive light maker that shakes up everything with or without our consent, continues in a square to Pluto (as it will for quite some time), so the klieg light treatment is unavoidable. It will happen, despite our best efforts to keep the curtains drawn on the labyrinthine caverns of our plutonic selves, whether collectively or individually. Jupiter here is offering us an alternative path out of the caves that is far less potentially damaging than the Uranus/Pluto square promises. The jarring will come, as every uranian square does, but Jupiter allows us the choice to ascend the cobbled streets of enlightenment in a kinder, more abundant and benevolent manner. It is the way that can allow the seeds of darkness to become the plants and trees of a more nurturant way of being. Jupiter is the great royal, ready to be-knight us in honor of our best efforts in examining our darkest of hearts.

The effort, however, must be made. In earnest and without expectation of reward. Expect nothing from the effort. It is incumbent upon us to learn the lesson that we do the hard work because it is the right thing to do, not because it brings us profit or reward. It is to be done because it is correct for humanity, not necessarily for ourselves. When that ego is undone (bound up as it is with all the secrets and lies of the Pluto in our charts), the time will arrive when a different kind of abundance and, more importantly, fulfillment, can be experienced. And that is the paradox in the lesson of Jupiter in any chart. During this particular period of time, we have the opportunity to learn the lesson deeply and quickly, if we so choose.

This aspect of the trine will be further underlined as the Moon in Taurus conjuncts Jupiter on September 16th, bringing the deepest contentment and fulfillment of our hearts into the scene. Everything softens up here and we can let our most emotional secrets be revealed to us under the wing of Jupiter as Luna’s escort. This will be a place of comfort and refuge, an important aspect as, at that same time, Venus in Libra will be squaring Pluto and in opposition to Uranus in fiery Aries. Revelations and changes around our relationship to relationships and their structures may well be at hand. Our I/Thou concepts have a big potential to be jolted (Venus in Libra is no match for Uranus in Aries, so shakeups are highly likely). Squares and oppositions are there for growth and, the trines are there for integration and their gentler angles guide us along a bit softer path. Shakeups and integrations are at hand right now.

Ride the trines in this turbulent surf.

Playful Love

Thank you to my readers for continuing to visit my blog, though my writing has been sparse of late.  That is temporary and the result of an impending move.  Packing and continuing consulting sessions are all that are on my plate for the moment.  I am appreciative of the fact that readers are using the down time to read older posts.

The mundane tasks of sorting through clothing, silverware and books does provide open time for reflection and dream time.  The dissolution of my current home has left me with ample hours to muse on these Neptunian and Plutonic times of discovering and uncovering my own (as one small part of our collective unconscious) deepest secrets and dissolving old forms of thought, assumptions and structures for conducting our lives (Neptune in Aquarius, Pluto in Capricorn, both retrograde at the moment {as are Chiron, Uranus and Mercury as well})  Reflection and review of both our personal and collective epochal themes are the order of the day.

I will be back up in more open waters early to mid-September with my writing and your patience is welcomed.

Just a thought from the Hopi as guidance for these heated times:

There is a river flowing now very fast.  It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.  They will try to hold on to the shore.  They will feel they are being torn apart, and they will suffer greatly.  Know the river has its destination.  The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above the water.  See who is in there with you and celebrate.  At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally.  Least of all, ourselves.

The Elders, Oraibi, Arizona Hopi Nation

There could be no better instruction for creating a true and lasting relationship with the Neptunian influences at work now. Those influences will expand and deepen until Spring of the year 2025, when Neptune finally enters Aries.  On that date (March 30) and at that time, 7 of our planets will be situated in a mega-stellium in the first house, the house of identity.  That will be a big day and, if we have done our homework through these next 13 1/2 years, we will arrive in a clear place of self understanding, ready to take on our world with the vigor and fortitude of the Spring Ram. Think of that day and time as a birthday party celebration for which you have an invitation in your hand well in advance of the fete.

As we know, Neptune entered Pisces March 19, 2011, went retrograde June 23 and re-entered Aquarius August 4.  Neptune will go direct again November 9, 2011 and re-enters Pisces February 3, 2012.  We are being asked to spend serious time reviewing and integrating our mental and emotional selves through these transitions in order to prepare ourselves for the deep and long dive into the spiritual and emotional waters of our selves and our cultural values that will ensue next year and on into the middle of third decade of the millenium.

Don’t be a landlubber, get in and swim.  Some water noodles and inner tubes are okay to use in the beginning while you gather strength, but eventually you will have to let those go, too (that’s the last vestige of the ego-personal baggage that’s just got to go).  If you get into trouble, always remember to flip on to your back, relax and breathe deeply and evenly – you will float, I guarantee that.  Struggling and thrashing will send you to the bottom very quickly.  Start wading now and get yourself used to a completely different medium in which to move and hopefully master like dolphins.  If you haven’t physically done so, imagine swimming with them in Kaleakekua bay on the Big Island of Hawaii.  Dolphins are exceedingly thrilling to observe, listen to and swim with. They actually spend quite a bit of time trying to get humans to engage in play with them.  They are intelligent and witty and smile constantly.  They are mammals of the heart and demonstrate a high degree of patience with their terra-based cousins.  I have never known anything but joy in their presence.  Imagine that they are your personal escorts through your submarine world.

Be well on your journeys.  I will resurface and see you shortly on the other side of mine.

In light.

Post Script:

I do, indeed, know how scary the waters can be.  I am not interested in entertaining vacuous platitudes in my writings, and I know exactly what can happen when Neptune arrives on the scene.  Even strong, competent swimmers can succumb to panic and drown. When I was younger and far more stupidly arrogant, I would scratch my head and wonder how such a thing could have happened.  How could someone so able drown like that?  The idiots, I used to think, all puffed up with my own certainties.

I learned my lesson years later training for competitive triathlons. I learned of the terror that can overcome us at a very intimate and personal level.  It is, indeed, humbling when nature comes along and strips one’s ego to the bone, leaving one naked in a place of vulnerability for which we have no previous experience.

In the days of my triathlon career,  which is now eons ago, I was also well-ensconced as the director of a major trauma team at a major hospital.  At the height of my physical, intellectual and leadership capabilities.  I trained for races primarily in my local YWCA swimming pool.  Back and forth, nice and safe. Wonderful and lovely, but that’s kiddie land compared to open water.   Knowing this, I also regularly took training swims in Walden Pond (yes, the Walden Pond) to acclimate myself to the conditions of competitions, which are held in lakes and oceans.  Formal triathlon races are very high testosterone events, partaken of usually by the over-the-top, viciously driven, type A professionals who will, as in their careers, do anything to win.  Doctors and lawyers are found in abundance among the participants. Occupying a slightly a lower tier of the type A personality group and unable to afford the usual $25,000 ultra-light triathlon bikes those folks rode, I was a middle-of-the-packer, trundling along on my 25-pound, $400 hybrid bike during the second leg, watching the whizzers whiz by. (Well, I always knew I would pass many of them by on the final leg, my forte, the run).

Now, I own and regularly drive a 1977 Westfalia camper van and I’m used to being passed up on the highways and biways of America’s roadways on a regular basis.   A grin and a peace sign wave is all I have to offer as I watch others’ tail lights fade off into the distance ahead of me at warp speed.  Regardless of my previous, professional work, I  always competed not just to have a goal for my training regimens, but also to come to know and test my own personal limits and abilities just for myself.  Just to know very intimately the stuff of which I am made.  Winning isn’t really a factor, though the structure of competitive races provides the push and challenge we often do not reach alone.  They are the spark that lights the fire in the butt.  As a Taoist, however, I am also always happy now to yield the path to the frenetic spasms of the unfortunately and chronically hurried.  I was then, too.  I raced myself and the clock, no one else.

Those folks, however, have no compunction about swimming right onto and over anyone to hit the finish line first, and I often found myself plunged to the bottom of shallow lakes by men who outweighed me by at least 80 pounds.  This is a darwinian, kill type of crowd, which is why there are always so many lifeguards on surfboards stationed throughout these race courses.  If one is to enter the arena of competition, at any level and for any reason, one must understand absolutely that it is a cut throat sport and preparedness is key.

One day, I was out on my usual training swim on Walden Pond and had easily gotten out about three hundred yards off shore.  I remember  swimming merrily along in my usual, strong way, enjoying the expansive counter point to the confines of the gym pool. I always swam alone, confident in my abilities.  It would never have occurred to me to not have total confidence in my abilities, though it would turn out I had no idea how limited they actually were at the time.

For some unknown reason, on this particular swim, stroking consistently and blissfully along as I always did, I began gazing down into the depths below me, following the sun’s rays penetrating into the seemingly bottomless void below me. Very slowly, however, some strange, mesmerizing ambience began emerging out of the greenish hue all around and imperceptibly and quite sereptitiously seeping into my unconscious.  Something very subtle and unnameable began to alter reality just beyond my vision and eventually engulf it totally.  Those innumerable rays seemed to go on and on into infinity, linear forms moving away into a parallax view held in medium of waves.  A vague sensation of queasiness and dizziness started to rise up in my belly and mind.  I felt myself becoming lost in a three-dimensional dreamscape, pulled ever-deeper into a foreign place that possessed no boundaries nor anchor points.  I do not know exactly when nor how, but I hit a real and imaginary end point in that vast and open space – a sand bar bumping up against my previously even keel.

In that instant, out of the blue, without any forewarning, a perfect storm of fear and disorientation arose like a tsunami.  My reverie turned a sharp corner and a startling and unexpected terror seized the moment.  Much to my complete surprise, I found myself suddenly and inexplicably unable to swim.  I literally had know idea what to do.  Within seconds I began to seriously flounder, coming into an upright position to regain some sense of security and groundedness in a fluid medium awash within a previously unknown, amorphous landscape of  mental confusion.  Instinctively, I began trying to tread water, albeit with increasingly weak and rubbery legs, a state which was just as quickly and surprisingly followed by thrashing vainly with my arms and in an attempt to try to grasp onto a surface that had no firm hand holds nor substance.

And that’s when I found myself going under, unable to keep my head above water, reaching down to find ground that wasn’t there, swallowing water as the hyperventilating effects of panic took over.  Like a wild-eyed wildebeest desperately looking for safety in crocodile-infested waters, I scanned the surface of the lake searching for anyone out there who could help.  I was, of course, utterly alone, though able to perceive fathers and toddlers on shore, giggling and running with sand pails, oblivious to my predicament.  After my third aspirating submergence and realizing with sudden sobriety that I wasn’t going to come up again after more than one or two more of these episodes, some clear, potent and urgent voice addressed the situation directly and with utmost immediacy, “Amelia, if you don’t get a hold of yourself right now you are going to drown.  You will drown yourself  here and die.”

Somehow, somewhere, my brain was able to recognize that statement as the cold, hard truth and the idea of my own mortality brought me back to some semblance of rationality. It was akin to grabbing my own collar and shaking myself into sanity. I am going to die right here right now.  Unless I do something about it.  It pierced through my irrational activities and provided the anchoring, metaphysical hand necessary to find my way out of this base emotional place and extreme danger.  The voice, which had been instilled and ingrained in my memory through my mother’s insistence of swimming lessons for all of her children beginning at age 4, entered the scene with firm commands: “Roll over onto your back. Do it. Do it right now.”  I obeyed without thought or resistance. “Now, breathe slowly and deeply.”  I obeyed again.  That 4-year-old kinesthetic wisdom, gifted to me by my long-ago swimming instructor, saved my life.  I remained exactly where I was, just floating and breathing, until I felt calm reason restored.  And then I made myself stay there even longer.  Just floating, until I was sure that any vestige of fear had gone. Until I was ready to move again, from a clear and anchored place within.  The entire episode, though it felt like eternity, probably unfolded within a span of no more than 2 minutes, beginning to end.  It can happen that quickly.  And could have, very easily, ended quite differently than it did.

I pondered the brevity and fragility of, and my new-found gratitude for, life as I slowly kicked my way, with the sun and breeze on my upturned face, all the long way back to shore.

Yes, well, there, dear, you almost became one of those idiots you once criticized. That was a good one, yeah. Okay, got it.  Our mirrors are many and enlightening moments are truly humbling and life changing.  And they are great for digging up our truly stupid aspects.  We experience them throughout our lives, building upon each one as they come along, ready and able as they are to give us that next leg up in expanding our state of awareness.

Fear can take hold to any of us at any time. It is the warp and weave of panic that can overtake us during any mundane activity.

These are uncertain times.  Our terrain is rapidly changing. Avoidance of acknowledging our innermost fears (which are going to visit us with Pluto and Neptune dancing a semi-sextile at the moment) will lead to thrashing.  We have to know they are there, as Pluto’s secrets will always be revealed, however it is we need to receive the message.. They can become our worst enemy, or our saving grace. Embrace them.  I would not have fully appreciated and come to know the power of my own internal strength and will to live (that voice) had I not experienced and realized the full extent of my own destructive and easily-induced terror. The trick to master as we ready ourselves for submergence into deeply emotional waters is to feel it, acknowledge it and then transform it into more integrated and mature thought/emotion/activity processes that ultimately benefit us and others.  Our very survival depends upon cultivating that ability.

Neptune’s influence in our chart and lives can feel exactly like what I have just described from my own experience.  Many people in America have absolutely no relationship with their internal, watery, emotional/spiritual/altered consciousness selves and encountering it can feel very much like drowning.  We are trained and educated to believe and invest ourselves in the concrete and to evaluate our competencies around that structure.  Pluto will insist those structures come down (Pluto in Capricorn in the second house in the U.S. Sibley Chart – please do read Jessica Murray’s book, Soul Sick Nation, which covers this subject thoroughly and will assist in placing our personal lives into a meaningful cultural context).

As our social, economic and political structures collapse, it can feel like a vicious darwinian competition for survival.  That all depends on what one believes is essential for survival.  That will become the dividing line between those that cling helplessly to the shore of the old structures and those that can push out into open water.  It is the dividing line between those who have staked their sense of identity on the externals – those that seek the glory of that proverbial finishing tape across the chest – and those whose entire identity arises from within.  The voice of superficial strength needs lots of applause; the voice of power whispers quietly in our own ear.  The person of speed always gets on the bus first;  the person of quickness responds to a changing environment with flexibility and grace.  These are the lessons embedded within the Tao.

Neptune’s co-influence with Pluto will feel very much like a dissolving away of terra firma amidst mind-numbing revelations.  It will feel like coming home and wanting to open the door to your home only to find the door has no handle.  Disorienting.  You can stand there cursing the loss, or start wandering around looking for another solution to the situation.  It will feel like a deep, though inscrutible new reality is beginning to assert itself at the periphery of your vision, something you see out of the corner of your eye, only to turn and find nothing is there.  Somehow, though things appear somewhat the same, they will feel very different.  This is how Neptune shows up.  One won’t even be able to offer any concrete or rational proof of the difference, and there are no real words to describe it.  One just knows it is happening, like the vague feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity of the characters in the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  A nice film for grokking how Neptune in Aquarius can feel. While you are dreaming, someone is messing with your mind.  Just make sure its you.

We are entering into a time of opportunity for deep spiritual and emotional discovery.  Remember the Tao:  That which can be named is not the true Tao.  The true Tao has no name.  That is the heart of spiritual essence.  Seek it and become comfortable within it.  It is the core of maintaining equipoise in the face of constant change.

Now is the time for spiritual swimming lessons; now is the time to memorize the concrete statements of the inner self that can lead us out of danger at a later date.  Now is the time to plumb the depths of our creativity, flexibility and adaptability, which ultimately lead us to our own intelligence in the face of uncertainty.

Persephone Returns to Her Mother

The reclamation required in an examination of the story of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, must be conducted on both the material and metaphoric realms in order for its message to be fully comprehended.  This is the story first and foremost of the intense love and devotion of a mother for her daughter.  It is also, however, one of the first examples of how the patriarchy takes a distinctly feminine narrative and alters it, not just for its own immediate benefit, but to shape all future narratives in service of that patriarchal agenda.  Like the asphalt and carpets that have buried the once vibrant heart of natural and holistic civilizations, the stories of ourselves have also been painted over with foreign words.  They have been left as dry, truncated husks  - empty tomes whose only purpose is to serve the needs of political, social, economic and religious institutions bent on exercising authority and power over others. The need here is to pull up the rugs, open the closets, air out and reclaim  these narratives.  They are stories of love, passion and the deep desires of individuals to serve the good of the whole.  They were not written down at all – they were not etched into stultifying, leather-bound encyclopedias.  They were, rather, engaged in and played out within the rich and unpredictable terrain between the bookends of thousands of years of living.  They are stories of blood and birth, of harvest and cornucopias, of reverence and duty to that which is, indeed, incomprehensible to the human mind, the divine intelligence which infuses all things with life. The focus of those intertwining and intersecting epochs, eras, and communal and singular lives were centered upon the subtle and brilliant movements between the once-fluid masculine and feminine energetics, guided by the wisdom of the goddess. Ancient Taoists understood why the goddess element was meant to serve as the organizing element in any endeavor, as is found in their prime directive, symbolized by the ancient tai chi yin/yang primordial circle with two polarized dots and regions : “remember the yang (masculine), but stick to the yin (feminine).”  This means that it is important to remember when the use of pointed, structured interventions (yang) are necessary in traversing life, but to know that the essential foundations of that life are found in the yielding, watery realms of the yielding yin.  Humanity has, over the eons, reversed that principle and we are now living the consequences of disobeying it. In Part I of Demeter’s Love, I introduced a number of elements to the reader.  They are threads which will be picked up, worked into a fabric and woven together again.  That, in and of itself, is a reversal of the singular masculine, left-brain activity of constructing a linear narrative and sticking to it.  We all know our high school education, which stressed and trained us in the superiority of, and adherence to, the expository essay.  The linear drill goes like this: first, make your statement, then provide all supporting evidence to prove that statement, then make one’s concluding statements.  All wrapped up in a neat package.  That is, indeed, a true reflection of the left brain view of the world.  It works, however, for only one half of the brain. Unfortunately, the creative yin does not obey those rules of verbal and written expression.  It is why her part of the symbology is depicted as black – it is difficult to perceive her hidden wisdoms and it requires the cultivation of our impressionistic visionary abilities to follow her.  Yin meanders and wanders through the structures of life.  She traverses the sandy shallows of creeks and arroyos, picks her way through the stones of steep escarpments and weaves through the doorways and coattails of the shops and people who move along the avenues of modern cities.  She always colors outside the lines.  She moves and creates meaning as she goes along, ever-responsive to the changing needs of the contexts within which she finds herself.  She is, indeed, of water, fluid and adaptable. These are realms which the now stultified and immobile yang does not understand.  She is the wave form of light; she is “the tiger” of which Einstein knew he’d grasped the tail, but understood he would never comprehend the whole of.  The science of his mind was inspired by the wisdom of that intangible feminine element.  The now overly structured world which we inhabit despises the improvisational, unpredictable, serendipitous realm of the feminine, much to the detriment of our potential for integrated, human brilliance.  And a great deal of effort has been expended in order to destroy, demean and control that elemental. It is important to remember, however, in freeing ourselves from the prisons so precisely built and mortared by limited hands, that, just because you do not understand something does not mean it is pathological.  Unable to see into the dark, that is exactly what the male brain has attempted to do with the right side of their brains, so well-embodied by the female.  The stones and walls that have been built are, in fact, a direct reflection of the inabilities and limiting fears of the minds that built them.

Toward an Integrated Narrative

Stepping outside those gates is a necessary act if humanity is to become whole again.  One of the first writers to do so was Mary Catherine Bateson (daughter of the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson, the man responsible for the conception and study of cybernetics).  As the offspring of two creative scientists and possessed of her own high intelligence, she was able to translate the journey of the yin through life in a wonderful book, Composing a Life, which I came upon in the late 1980′s.  In it, she conceptualizes a completely different framework for understanding the notion of “achievement” by uncovering the meandering lives of five now famous women in leadership roles.  None of these women obeyed the linear career trajectories so valued by our hierarchical system of order and instead followed a riverine experience undertaken within richly woven personal and professional lives.  They all eventually came to serve in positions of great responsibility and authority. Another courageously disobedient person I found 10 years later is woman named Sobonfu Some’.  Many people are more familiar with her husband, Malidoma Some’, who was chosen by his spiritual elders in Burkina Faso to come to the United States and share the ancient spiritual understanding of his African people with us.  Sobonfu, herself recognized by those same elders from birth as a keeper of tradition ritual, began writing, albeit reluctantly, at the urgings of her husband.  In the introduction to her first book, The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient African Teachings in the Ways of Relationships, she openly discusses the fact that in order to write she had to relieve herself of the burden of having to right in the conventional, western format of linear narration.  Her writings are beautifully succinct, short descriptions of the deep longings of humanity for spiritual relationship with each other and her own experience, which illuminates and overcomes the great divide between people.  They are individual, brief stories told by a woman who deeply understands the hidden meanings that bind them together.  She trusts the reader’s own wisdom to find the threads of connection flowing within and through all of them.

Restoring the 2nd House to the Sacred Realm

The 2nd house is truly the house of our first and most important treasures.  They are not just the material things we are given as vulnerable infants and awakening toddlers that literally form the building blocks of our lives;  they are also the legacies and traditions our biological and spiritual kin have left for us – the firm ethical and moral motherland upon which our developing child places the blocks and legos which will later turn into homes and skills and education and meaningful vocations.  The legos are the divine, structured yang, the binding stories held within the bowl of our great grandmother’s teacup are the divine yin that gives all structure meaning. This really isn’t very difficult to understand, we just need to take our noses out of the immediate and step back and view the constant.  Both need to be held upon the scales of life experience (this should be a major contributing gift of those born under the sign of Libra, which isn’t about “justice” issuing from masculine institutions, but rather, from the spiritual balance that is ever-present in all of our choices – but that is a different essay).

The master of creative tao

Men (material) primarily build buildings and bridges and tables and such.  Women (spirit) provide the living, breathing worlds that take place within and upon them.  And I do not mean guys are guys and girls are girls.  The point is that we are all spiritually designed for, and are quite capable of, crossing over the artificially induced male/female gender roles within which we are currently required to operate (though history provides ample examples that women are far more able and adept in these crossings than men).  In every choice we make and every action we take as individuals, we can consciously become aware of the interplay between the masculine elements and the feminine elements at work and know which we are choosing to express (or the subtle and varied combinations thereof) at any given time and the reflective reasons why we have made such choices.  This requires flexibility and adaptability to the world around us and our responses to that world.  It requires a revitalization of the holy marriage between these masculine and feminine elements within each of us.  That activity is both inspiring and fun and serious and disciplined.  Genitalia have nothing to do with the issue.  That would be, of course, taking responsibility for ourselves and the materials and spiritual elements of which we are made and to which we answer in the end.  It remains to be seen whether humanity has the maturity and wisdom to take this aspect of ourselves firmly within our own hands and enact it wisely. In order for astrology to finally get with the program, it, just like the social/cultural constructs in which it is undertaken, needs to enunciate and hold holy the contributing polarities of each element that combine and dance with each other to form the whole of a meaningful chart and a fulfilled life.  So far, it has failed to do so.  Most settle for caricature over character.  At the moment, it continues to obey the old patriarchal rules that the major players (planets) are guys and the minor players (asteroids and such) are the cheerleading girls.  It would behoove the entire profession to actually go back and review each of the planetary influences and tease out the male and female elementals of each one, which are very obvious if one takes the time.  Neptune is the most strikingly ridiculous example of this outdated model of perceptual patriarchy at work.  The ruler of the deep, emotional, inchoate and mysterious depths of human emotion, psyche and soul is clearly not some gargantuan man holding a trident rising from the deep. The medium of water is held in the heart of the feminine.  And yet, most astrologer’s simply and superficially hold to the arcane male imagery because they are taught to do so by a long line of teachers who seem incapable of exercising contemplative awareness and logical imagination. A starting place is to imagine the different aspects of water:  sometimes it is a rushing, roaring waterfall, at others it is the still pond from which many wild and domestic animals drink.  Find and spend time with the varied expressions of this elemental and where and when it expresses itself in a more masculine form and when in a more feminine form.  Write about every possible expression of water in great detail;  approach them with the poet’s heart.  Listen, touch, smell and describe them with resolute precision.  The next evolution in that exercise would be to observe the transitions between water’s different states of being. Take the water fall, for example, and look at from a larger perspective.  Where does the more calm, yin flow of the river that feeds it begin to quicken and transform itself into the more narrow and forceful yang element?  After plunging into the body of water below, where does the forceful yang element dissolve, disorganize and re-organize itself into quiet flow again?  These are the exercises that allow an individual access to the dynamically rich, metaphoric and esoteric realms of nuance and sensuality that are the inherent and missing aspects of our relationship with each other and the divine elements.  They also define the difference between a two-dimensional astrological chart reader and a gifted interpreter of the tidal influences that ebb and flow throughout  a chart over the course of an individual’s lifetime. These treasures of the second house, in their fullness, are both the things and the meanings which our ancestors regularly celebrated and gave offerings and thanks for  - an act that requires true mastery of humbleness, humility and the realization that that which we receive in this lifetime has been entrusted to us. These gifts have been entrusted to us both by our physical ancestors and by the divine mother herself. Those who lived long before us understood that the power of their lives was completely dependent upon those gifts of nature, dependent upon the magical, mysterious transformation bestowed upon them within the secret temples of their mothers’ very wombs.  The masculine provides the seed, the feminine the transformational powers from which life issues forth.  Without the grace of the earth, water (blood) and spirit of the Mother, the simple seed withers and dies.  Nothing of beauty, value and wholeness comes to fruition without her blessing.  It was with and through her blessings that they survived and thrived, and they treated that understanding with respect and reverence.  Those who dwell outside of the current western framework of imbalanced yang, defined by domination and control, still do, despite modern man’s furious and violent attempts at denial and annihilation of this truth. Any reading of the planets and influences of the second house must (and a chart in general) must begin to come from a much broader and more inclusive conceptual framework than the set-default one currently in use, which relies on the greek and roman patriarchal conventions of story telling. As Sobonfu Some’ and others with similar intelligent integrative faculties point out, this failure has left us all telling incomplete stories and with a deep longing for the true richness of narratives we have the power and potential to cultivate in our lives, with each other.

Passionate Rage:

Reclaiming Divine Love

Yes, love does encompass justified rage, contrary to popular belief.  So also does it encompass the definitive and succinct word, “NO.”  The rage of Demeter in the face of her daughter’s kidnap and rape at the hands of Hades is our current metaphor for the consequences of our own rape and abuse of resources of our planet earth. The fruit of the pomegranate, bestowed by the graces of the goddess of fertility is turned to poison by the man who secures her daughter’s bondage.  That is exactly what has occurred in our larger human story.  The fact that our current turmoil of earthquakes, droughts, heated violence and explosive eruptions appears to be sudden and incomprehensible to the minds of so many is a reflection not just of our own myopia regarding consequences of actions undertaken over millenia, but is also the result of the now obviously misplaced patience of the divine feminine.  She has, indeed, waited far long enough for the children to awaken and begin to undertake more adult forms of commerce and communication.

And we have failed at our task, despite the on-going nurturance and abiding presence of the Mother.  Of course I am well aware that external influences upon our planet (solar flares, incoming asteroids, etc) play a part in our current environment.  However, the question here at hand is:  why now?  Why has the perfect storm of elementals and influences arisen now, in our communal consciousness?  As within, so without.  We call to ourselves that which will bestow upon us the lessons we need on our path of enlightenment from within.  The cosmic and earthly mother, like Demeter, has finally stood up as the warrior that she is.  Our children’s lives are at stake and, as any person out in the woods who has inadvertently gotten between a mother bear and her cub, the consequences of disregarding that bond can be fatal.  Unless, of course, the offending party realizes the error of their ways, regardless of how innocently they were originally undertaken, and moves out of the line of contact between Mother and her cub.

Humanity, unfortunately, has chosen the path of continuing along the precipitous line of fire, has deliberately and unconsciously continued to break the avenue of communication and protection between mother and her blood.  Deaf to the warning signs of nature that signal very clearly, “No,” we stumble along stupidly.  We all know what happens next: that grizzly rises up on her hind feet in order to fully survey the situation before beginning her death charge.  This is the heart of Demeter, who has given the wayward hiker all reasonable chances to correct an erroneous path.  Once she starts her run, however, she will not turn back and the entire fate of the hiker now lies outside of his hands.

Unlike the natural world, women have been trained over generations – through religious, social, cultural, political and economic avenues of the patriarchy – to believe that “love” is in acquiescing to powers she has been told are superior to her own.  She has lost her natural heart – the heart of the fierce protectrix. We have been corralled into believing that the symbol of Mother Theresa or the now-grotesquely caricatured and cartoonish figure of Florence Nightingale  - working tirelessly, endlessly, selflessly and (preferably) celibately, for the “good” of all others – is our only lot in life.  Unless, of course, we are servicing the needs of men as whores. We have substituted servitude for service, poverty for passion, power for niceness. Our value lies in our ability to give without remuneration or recognition and to smile silently and obediently at our handlers.  Unfortunately, the truth is that Mother Theresa was extremely depressed throughout her life and Florence Nightingale was, in reality, an amazingly strong, take charge woman who advocated not the stale, dark, sick rooms of patriarchal hospitals, but, rather, fresh air, exercise and  the great outdoors as the keys to health and healing.

Persephone was kidnapped from her sensuous, delight-filled explorations of the infinite creations of her Mother, dragged down into a dank underworld, and held against her will until she acquiesced to the diseased mind of Hades.  She refused to do so, much to the chagrin of her obsessed keeper.  Demeter summons the power of her rage at this profaning of her daughter’s innocence and of the beauty of the world.  She closes the flow of her spiritual womb and the earth dries and withers in the wake of her deprivation.  And this is as it should be.  In light of the desecration that caused this state of affairs, the deliberate action of the hand of a man, it is only right that the sacred is withheld.  We do not argue the need for this when the Church closes its doors in the face of a desecration, only to open them again once the space has been made holy again through ritual and ceremony.  Yet we seem to apply different rules to the temple of nature and the priestesses that tend these realms.  Humanity has desecrated the very ground upon which we stand, pissed and ejaculated on the altar, shredded the robes and broken the vessels within the sacristy of our sacred earth.

And we wonder now why the doors of our sanctuary are being closed before us?   They will not open for a very long time and, if the cyclical and rhythmic rule of wave forms apply, the re-consecration of the planet shall last for the same period sequence as its desecration over time.  The application of sine and cosine mathematical equations governing frequencies and amplitudes should leave us approximately 2500 to 5000 years in a state of declination.  Think of it as the great cleansing.  Small brains who only live within the concept of now (the two-year old level), are going to have a very uncomfortable time understanding the concept of “then” and “when.”

When we have realized the full extent of what we have done – recognized and fully felt the travesties we have wrought - then we will begin on the path of making ourselves worthy of the gift of trusteeship again.  We have blown it big time here and, given the breadth and depth of globalized dementia at the moment, our restoration to health will take some very seriously long spiritual rehabilitation to achieve.  The Hopi described this period of time very bluntly: “humanity shall crawl upon the face of the earth like animals, without heads.”  That makes sense to me – we haven’t figured out how to use the common sense and brilliant mind the divine creator gave us, so, why let us keep those useless heads?  It is actually a far more truthful, and therefore respectful, imagery than the one offered by the church, which participates in the same “kick the can down the road” mentality as our politicians and financial wizards.  There is no Second Coming. There is no deus ex machina that is going to descend from on high to save our sorry selves.  Such notions are the stuff of children, waiting for the parent to rescue them from their immature doings.  Except, however, we were supposed to have entered adulthood long ago.  Such notions are stories created  by those in positions of power to ensure that those they lead never, ever find their way to self empowerment, never grow up and leave the nest, never take the power of self-determination and responsibility into their own hands.  Those authorities and their flocks of sheep should remember the words of their Jesus:  ”All that I can do, so can you . . . And more.”  Those words, twisted and warped by cartoon power figures over centuries into something the original man is now turning in his grave over, convey the singular understanding that every one of us has the power within our own hands to make the profane sacred again, to re-consecrate what we have desecrated.  Waiting for someone else to do it for us just is not in the cards.

The truth is that The Second Coming happens every moment, every day of our lives, through every generation.  The face of the savior we have so long sought is to be found first in our own mirror.  It is the simple ability to take in the small agonies and ecstasies of our lives and, with the same heart stopping freshness as a newly stricken adolescent, to still fall in love with the very fact of just being alive.  Over and over again.  Throughout our limited time here.  Not because of someone or something else, but just because we have been created by the divine and given the experience of experiencing the vast wonders of the world of her creation. That experience unfolds over time within and through our mundane activities.  There is no singular “moment of enlightenment,” despite the claims of false gurus who love to tell of their own and then posture and parade upon stale pedestals and in front of clapping audiences.  No. The only aspect or enlightenment we can depend upon is our own unique and personal ability of continually returning to and renewing a relationship with a state of awareness and ecstasy  that expands and deepens within us over a lifetime.  It is the ability to commit the ultimate act of love – to stand utterly alone in front of our personal mirror, consider and regard our intimately private self – and, without any hesitation or withholding whatsoever, to say out loud to that reflection, “I love you.”  That is the feeling any true mother would want all of her children to have for themselves.  It is the kind of love to which we must summon ourselves to ourselves and for ourselves and each other every single day.  Love and enlightenment are acts of patience and endurance – the acts themselves revive the spirit that inspires them.

When we have realized that spark of divine spiritual love in the reflection of ourselves and, more importantly, in deeper reflection of ourselves in relationship to each other and this sacred vessel we call earth, which is one of the physical manifestations of the Mother Womb, we will begin to realize the difference between religion and spirituality.  We begin to see the divine in each other. The goddess isn’t somewhere out there in a book or on a tarot card;  she is the woman sitting at the head of our table, inside our own homes.  The messiah isn’t a character in a dusty old book or a figure frozen in posture in a window, either. He/She dwells within the bodies, hearts and minds of all of our children.

The love of Demeter is the powerful, mothering aspect of the creator and protector of all sacred things.  Her daughter, Persephone, is the embodiment of the beauty and innocence of the feminine aspect.  The core of the story is that it is right and correct that we all rise up in anger over her desecration.  Only then may we have any slim chance of avoiding our Hopi fate.  I am not talking about a mental idea.  I am talking about real actions that demonstrate that enough is enough, now.  Now.  Right now.

To do that, we have to undo another part of the story, which is found in the process of the decision making around the denouement here.  So, Demeter is angry at the wrong done to her daughter.  But, who is it that actually makes the decision around a “just” conclusion?  Zeus (male) and Hades (male).  They are brothers, no less, an original allusion to “the old boys club” where loyalty to each other outweighs the ability to discern right from wrong.  The brothers here conjure up a plan so that Hades can carry on his demented activities at least for one half of the year.  These are sociopathic kin striking deals with each other under which the rest of us must suffer.  To capitulate to a sociopath is a sociopathic action.  And, yet, we are all expected to swallow this (just like Persephone was forced to swallow the pomegranate seed) as a correct and natural idea.  It is not, yet this is exactly how male authority has dispensed its laws from the time they wrote them down.  Nowhere is there any mention of Demeter’s input into a just end to the story.  Yet no one questions this glaring absence, this denial of access to decision-making power, this refusal of the feminine voice in our legal, social, political and economic constructs.  We do need to demand that the voice of the sacred feminine (I do not mean girls who parrot patriarchal patterns), hold sway at the table.  The alternative is to let the boys and their stories kill us all.

In addition to the artificial and implanted “men make the decisions and girls do as their told” idea in the Demeter story, the boys take it a step further and decide to place an even more ridiculous spin on the story.  We are told that Persephone’s forced time of half the year in Hades’ version of a dirty boy’s bathroom, is the reason why we have Winter.  This should inspire loud guffaws, and it is surprising to me that it doesn’t.  First, if one does the math, Winter is only a 3 month period of time, so the half-year thing doesn’t exactly work.  Second, every season has been unfolding on this planet for billions of years, with and without human presence. These seasons belong to the never-ending cycle of birth and death that belong to the realm of the Mother and the cosmos, not to the hand of man.  It seems we are asked to suspend all logic so that males can continue to cast themselves at the center of all stories.  Narrative is a very powerful tool and here it has been used, as it is throughout our culture, to attempt to usurp and control the power of the feminine.

And that, of course, is the story that is coming to an end.  A new beginning, a new cycle, a new story is longing to be told.  And we do, collectively, have the power to write/right it.

Our earth, all the planets in our solar system and all the solar systems in our universe revolve around the sacred shape of the ovum, the only biological entity which can take unto itself the raw materials of fertility and transform itself into the fullness of the human (and all other fauna) form.  The ovum allows the seed to enter into that temple of transformation.  Force is not an appropriate element of divine conception.  The encircling womb holds the seed within the ovum and is the only vessel within which the union between these masculine and feminine aspects, as well as the human form in its unique entirety, can be realized.

No amount of forced intercourse, no amount of demented attempts at restructuring our DNA, no amount of cloning, of penetration of our food and bodies with nanoparticles, nor pretensions to the possession of the immortality gene, will ever change the laws of nature.  They are so, with or without us.  Our perfection is bestowed upon us by the intangible love of the cosmos.  Our only task is to hold and honor it with the intelligent wisdom and reverence it deserves.  These qualities, these very human qualities, must be summoned quickly, immediately and with conscious haste.  Otherwise, it will be with great sorrow that we look upon the entire lifetime of humanity as a great loss and waste.

As above, so below.  As within, so without.