Wednesday, October 26, 2011

It's the End of the World

The air is full of signs this morning.  A gusting breeze rises and falls, swirling the wind chimes hanging on the front of the Airstream; stirring the branches of the ubiquitous cottonwood tree that guards the front of my campsite.  The ground is littered with little yellow leaves dried up and curling on the gravel drive.

The sky is patches of sunlight framed by clouds that hold expectant rain and lightning and thunder.  Across the treetops I see a flash and then a roll of sound that starts like a low clearing of the throat then crescendos into a crash that reverberates and tumbles past my ears.

A raven glides past, left to right, just before the rain starts to drum my blue and white awning.  Yes . . . drumming . . . and I seem to hear the soft thump of the divine mother’s heart pulsing at the core of the planet.  This is a pause in the quickening that has seized all of existence; like the moments between the beats of your heart.

We are all counting backwards now – all embodying the spirit of the Heyoka – today, tomorrow, then the last day of the calendar – the end of time as we know it – the end of an age, they say – the destruction of the fourth world.  And what do we know of the fifth?  Nothing.  And we are striving to not create the next world in the image of the one which has died. 

I grew up in a family that celebrated the “end times”.  We looked forward to the end of the world as you would the coming of Christmas.  My parents were trapped in a cosmology that envisioned this life as a “veil of tears” that would not be lifted until this life was over. 

My father was literally trapped in a body that was a prison; racked with crippling rheumatoid arthritis.  He had a profound connection to spirit and a rich prayer life, but he misunderstood that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” means it is in your hand if you will only close your fingers around it.  His disability brought new meaning and intense struggle to that metaphor.

My father knew that heaven was just a click away, but he and my mother did not accept the mantle of being co-creators of their existence.  They saw “through a glass darkly” and it was not their time for realizing the fullness of their relationship with eternity.  But they live on in their children; they carried us to the mountain top so we could see the Promised Land which lay ahead, but they could not cross over that threshold with us.  That is to be for us alone, like the chosen ones in the Bible story, if we can fasten onto the truth and not be distracted by shiny things. 

I keep hearing, like a mantra, “now we have no choice”.  We have to step up.  We have to claim our birthright, with all its blessings and responsibilities.  We have to step into the reason we were born – we are not here at this time by accident.  We are here on purpose and we have been entrusted with the care of the planet and all its citizens. 

“Old things are passed away, behold all things are become new.”  I am quiet and pensive as I wait for the end of the world.  The worst of the rainstorm has passed, which at its peak forced me indoors to be protected . . . cocooned.  I have no fear, though I am also not given to excitement.  It is time to be quiet and mindful – noticing our steps and our words.

Because our every action; our every word creates new life – we spin new universes. 

What will we create today?


Follow John on:  earthschoolforsouls.com

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Now is the Time!

Recently, I participated in a workshop where the statement, “Now is the Time!” became a recurring theme.  And in the following weeks the slogan seems to have gotten momentum.  It is THE time for so many things.  We have to ask ourselves, as we transform and reinvent ourselves, what is our responsibility for reinventing and transforming “the collective”?
We know that the collective mindset and vibration are a reflection of our own processes, then at what point do we extend ourselves into the wider world to up-level collective attitudes and behaviors?  I keep hearing:  “Now is the time.”
It has been part of my own awakening during the past two years to move my attention away from the distraction of politics and the insane left versus right dialog.  But I am a child of the sixties so I noticed with interest the grassroots birthing of the Tea Party movement.  I also noticed how quickly they became subsumed and co-opted by party politics, all the while wildly waving the false flag of fierce independence.
Now I notice the Occupy Wall Street movement and the reactions they are spurring in our opinion leaders.  Some on the left are wondering if they can ride the coat tails of this significant voting block without jumping on the bandwagon of radical social disruption.  Many on the right are demonizing the movement as a direct threat to everything we hold dear in this country:  mom, baseball, and apple pie. 
  
Count me as one who is ready to shake things up.  All bets are off.  The Occupy (Your Town’s Name Here) movement is about a fundamental dissatisfaction with the status quo.  We are dissatisfied with the way things do NOT work.  We are way past the point of just trusting the system to correct itself – to find its own center.  There was nothing sacred about our economic system, our political system, or our form of government in the first place.
  
We have been fed countless lies from the day we were born.  But the waking up to the truth of our being includes a concomitant realization that our social constructs and our most revered belief systems are largely arbitrary. 
I have been railing lately about the need to become free of our own personal boxes that keep us from stepping into our highest imagining – but we also need to take a good look at all the larger boxes that keep us from our highest good whether they be family, relationships, country, economic systems, political parties. . . . 
Even if you live in a beautiful golden cage with plush furniture and a wide screen TV, it is still a prison.  And anything can become a box; even the latest cause or your habit of healing yourself.  Take a good look at your Belief Systems, and notice that the initials for that are B.S. 
So part of my awakening is about ripping the mask off the illusion.  We are witness to a radical adjustment in our culture as it must begin to mirror what is happening within us.  We know that we have to die and be reborn on a daily basis – and so must the structures that contain us.

“Occupy Wall Street” is about the death of an outdated and unjust system to control the other 99% of us for the dubious benefit of the few.  Do we have something better to put in its place?  Seriously, how could we do worse?  It is time to eat this sacred cow, and NOW IS THE TIME!

http://occupywallst.org/