ONE ON one -- that is our relationship to the Divine, to All That Is. That is our relationship with life, in general; certainly that is the kind of intimacy that plays out with our friends and family. The quality of our relationships tells us all about ourselves. Indeed, our ability to make that kind of deep, abiding connection is our umbilical cord to growth and strength, the catalyst to understanding both ourselves and our place in time and space.
We have come through several decades of "Me-Me"ism, of "Greed is Good" and "He with All the Toys Wins" consciousness. It was a fascinating and exciting adolescence, I think we can all agree. We were pushed, prodded and, in some cases, pummeled into discovering our own uniqueness, the flavor and scent of our own soul-signature, our remarkable talents and abilities, weaknesses and baggage -- we turned ourselves inside out to gather all of our own subjective information.
If we noticed, somewhere in our time travel, that we were also riddled with great empty holes of disconnect and dissatisfaction, we began a process of seeking "what else" might be out there. Many of us did; some of us did not, blinded by the constant drumming of commerce and competition, the lure of "get, have, keep" and the notion that doing what everyone else is doing will make us happy.
Our relationship to everything outside of ourselves serves as a litmus test of our ability to relate to our own emotional essence. Our relationship to '
stuff,'
for instance, is a handy (and addictive) diversion to actual conscious living, but it's not going to make us happy. It doesn't take a prophet to see all the signs around us that we must take on the responsibility for ourselves and our own happiness. We've left that in the hands of government, corporate interests, religion and national-tribal-familial traditions for too long. They've failed us because they must; that was never their job in the first place.
In the grand scheme of things, these institutions have a contextual place in our experience, but they are not THE experience. We keep looking outside of ourselves to find "it," but that elusive thing we're looking for can only peek out from behind the shadows when we launch a one-on-one conversation with ourselves, and listen in the stillness for our own answers.
"Having" is no sin, of course. We all want a lifestyle that offers us access to the diverse pleasures and plenty the world offers. The problem with our consumerism is that it has been, until lately, fairly mindless. For instance, when you offer your child a banana as a healthful alternative to one of the empty, calorie-laden snacks the US produces in abundance (laced with chemicals and the ever-present corn syrup that was a political expediency of this government, converting its surplus into a cheap commodity), are you aware of the bloody
corporate and political maneuvering that brought it to your supermarket?
Had it occurred to you that the phrase "banana republic" might have something to do with the actual process of harvesting the fruit? In our own lives, playing out "getting and having," combined with a disinterest in the particulars, makes us the problem -- the target market -- and not the solution to sociopolitical inequity.
Our ability to be responsible for our choices is a one-on-one dialogue with our own conscience, our Higher Self; we cannot have that dialogue if we choose to remain in ignorance. The lead that comes into our children's hands from China has been a bit of a wakeup call for some of us -- but are we connecting the dots from that lesson to our daily experience? Each thing we buy began somewhere; do we know where? When I think of bananas, these days, I think of this quote from Khalil Gibran:
To you the earth yields her fruit and you shall not want if you but know how to fill your hands. It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that you shall find abundance and be satisfied. Yet unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice, it will lead some to greed and others to hunger.
It was not so long ago that the foundations of safety and prosperity that we have come to expect in this nation didn't exist -- our elders remember the Great Depression, a time in which there were no social safety nets such as Social Security or Unemployment, not even a system of national highways to connect the coasts. In what economists call a "devaluation cycle," the stock market "corrected itself" in 1929, and it was a fall heard around the world -- the United States was plunged into unemployment and poverty owing in part to consumer and commercial debt, a faltering "free market," unequal distribution of wealth and inaction by the US Federal Reserve (a private entity, not under the direction of the president or the US Treasury). And let us not forget the "dust bowl" -- a weather disaster similar to those that we endure today. Wikipedia (Dec. 4, 2007) gives us this
quote:
Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1932, primarily blamed the excesses of big business for causing an unstable bubble-like economy. Democrats believed the problem was that business had too much power, and the New Deal was intended as a remedy, by empowering labor unions and farmers and by raising taxes on corporate profits.
A little déjà vu, in that description? A little grab-yer-heart angst as we repeat an old pattern? This can't be news to anyone who has noticed the devalued dollar, the bursting of the housing bubble or the weeping and wailing and
dire predictions of the financial institutions who have enjoyed long years of uninterrupted power with minimal oversight.
Pundits have been telling us for at least five years that the Bush administration has given us another era of "
robber barons,"
yet we did not adjust our standard of living to reflect that concern. Worker and retirement protections went south with Enron and the like in the first years of this new century, yet we have spent as though there was no squeeze to the middle class, as if Katrina had not given us a glaring portrait of what happens if you're a have-not in America.
Have we questioned the fact that the Republican presidential candidates use all their airtime to attack immigrants, protect the military-industrial complex and spend more valuable time in loud, angry debate about who is more faithful to Christianity's tenets than in attempting to correct the inequities of our time?
Are we really this dense a national entity? We seem to be in the business of proving Karl Marx on the button when he declared, "Religion is...the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
Some decry the glut of information that comes to us now, much of it suspect and manipulative, much of it overwhelming in both its volume and implication, but there is one point on that compass that will lead us to our True North -- we know. Even if we don't think we know, we do.
We know that much is wrong, that as warm as we may be this winter sitting in front of our hearth, many are freezing and dying; we know that even as we scramble to put food "on our families," to quote a Bushism, children die daily from starvation and want. Some of us (me, for instance) can look out our window and see a home that's been repossessed, standing cold, empty and inanimate as a tomb; and due to lending practice and sudden economic panic, it will not be inhabited soon.
Many of us are hanging onto our jobs by our fingertips, wondering who or what will be slashed from the budget next. There is no longer any doubt that the next generation will be less well off than the previous. (And why, considering our voracious appetites, we thought that was the "gold standard" in America is as fraught with illusion and rhetoric as is the gold standard itself.) There is no longer any doubt about our decline.
Yet, despite all appearances, this is no time for fear. It's a moment of recognition. We've been here before, we've done this -- we know how. We need to let go of any remaining denial and face it squarely. Little bulldog of a president, Harry Truman, gave us a scale upon which to weigh our circumstances when he said, "It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours." It has taken a meltdown of our American dream to make us understand that we're all in this boat together. While a few of us are still buying the rhetoric that the "enemy" is a turbaned suicide bomber who wants to turn us into faithful Muslims, many more of us are coming to realize that the enemy is greed, egoism and mindless complicity with a flawed and corrupt system.
Some astrologers are calling our current Jupiter/Pluto conjunction the "Big Bang." It is taking us up and over the littleness with which we have regarded ourselves and one another. Jupiter demands a higher truth while Pluto whispers to us from behind the doorway of power, directing our attention to the shadows and all that we will find there.
What we will find is that the power is ours -- it always was. We had just forgotten, taken the easy path of the apparent inevitability of patriarchy and social apathy and lazy citizenship. But that time has come to an end. We're poised now on an emotional revolution -- yes, we're having a powerful heart awakening. As
one astrologer put it, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way." And we must do that with a renewed sense of our authenticity as evolving entities, as brothers and sisters, working toward the liberation of our souls.
Our new paradigm, in true Aquarian fashion, is no longer about what we can individually collect to make ourselves safe. As long as some of us are endangered, we all are. How do we heal ourselves while children are raped and murdered in Darfur, how do we take confidence in rule of law while American citizens are denied the right of habeas corpus, how do we plan for a future in a nation we no longer recognize, a world rocked with violence and cruelty and power struggles that threaten to obliterate us? How do we face tomorrow when the icebergs are melting and the polar bears are drowning and we stand watching, with no answers and no interest? Answer: we can't.
Our new energy signal is not about "I." It's about "WE." It's about ALL of us working together for the common good, with respect for Gaia and one another. Our creativity and joy can only return to us if we're willing to give it away as if it were infinite, which of course it is. And if we've done our homework, gone within to have that one-on-one conversation with our Higher Angel, then we can be confident that that is our work, here -- that is our purpose in the 21st century. But have a care that you come to this Divine project with humility and a deep understanding of your motives. Attributed to an aboriginal activist, this warning is one we should take to heart:
If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
I've salted this piece with a number of quotes, most of them from our past...proving, again, that none of this is new. What we have played out these last few decades is the final passage of a repeating pattern, an old paradigm of human experience, and we find ourselves, now, on the brink of creating a new one.
God/dess has no grandchildren -- nothing you bring with you from your past, no connection to mundane power, no finite resource, no sense of privilege or class can help you enter in. Your ticket to ride will be handed to you when you show your credentials: your willingness, your compassion, your courage. It will ask you to define who you are, not what you have or what you've been taught by the talking heads of the old dimensional contract.
Who we are is what is changing and what must change if we are to survive, if we are to grab at happiness and fill ourselves from the great common reservoir of love that is its source. I'll leave you with one last quote, from Ralph Waldo Emerson -- and a question only you can answer:
"We are very near to greatness; one step and we are safe. Can we not take the leap?"
CREDITS: Associate Editor: Priya Kale. Webmaster: Anatoly Ryzhenko. Proofreader and Fact Checker: Sara Churchville. Horoscope Editor: Jessica Keet. Associate Photo Editor: Sharon Bellenger. Business Manager: Chelsea Bottinelli. Published by Planet Waves, Inc., a Washington State corporation, all rights reserved.
