By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
HUMANKIND IS IN a most remarkable window of opportunity, here in this time frame between eclipses. Eclipse energies are agents of change, both closing and setting patterns and cycles that last decades. The Aug. 1 eclipse is echoing another that occurred in 1989, a year of revolution, and once again all eyes will swing to Beijing as we begin the Olympics; in '89, remember, we were watching heroic Chinese citizens in Tiananmen Square defy their oppressive government.
I am ever impressed with the possibilities that are being regularly presented to us to step away from our density, our conditioning and our limited view of life; we are in such a holy space now. We are immersed in possibility, urged forward by powerful emotions and the whisper of our higher angels.
You might be wondering at my choice of the word holy. When we are given remarkable opportunity to grow into our authentic human potential, there is a sacred quality that fills and informs us. We are put on high alert, somewhere in our psyche; perhaps in our very soul. Llamas, or Imbolc, arrived on the same day as the Leo/Aquarian eclipse this year. Imbolc is one of the Greater Sabbats in the Wiccan tradition, a cross-quarter point between Solstice and Equinox and considered even more potent.
Imbolc is a celebration of harvest, when plenty and gratitude commiserate with the lush power of the Leo Sun and the lazy August days. These are the weeks that urge us to move slowly, that paint our skin with heat and sweat, that offer up the ripe produce of a season's planting for our tables and invite us to enjoy the fading pleasures of summer.
A clear sign, in my mind, of this nation's disconnect with nature is this current insistence that our children return to school in August; our internal clocks are set to feel and experience, our instinct primed to play and purr in late-summer lethargy. We are still filling our batteries; this is no time to flip the on switch.
We might think of those two variables, Imbolc and the eclipse, happening at the same time as power squared. Now add the moment that comes at mid-point of the eclipse window, Aug. 8 -- more than a simple if unique number, such as 7/07/07 for instance, when people rushed to get married or play the Lotto; the 8 Gate, as some are calling it, actually adds numerically to produce an 8. 8 is the energy of power, substance and manifestation; the number which, when tipped on its side, is the sign for infinity. My dear friend Christine DeLorey at Creative Numerology writes about the implications of
8 energy here, giving us much to ponder.
As Leo (the fifth sign of the zodiac and capable of embracing the highest potential of the personal conscious self), squared off against Aquarius (the cool, impersonal guardian of the collective self), we opened a window of integration between the two: a holy space for the collision of both personal and social evolution. A Full Moon lunar eclipse will close it on August 16. All that occurs within that window will both conclude old patterns of experience and begin new ones; if we are mindful, we can maximize that energy to lift us and take us toward our authentic life path, or purpose.
I will remind you that purpose without service to the whole will bring us limited success and satisfaction. The language used by both these signs include "we": both the imperial "We" of the Lion King, confident in leadership, and the collective "we" of Aquarius, also known as the Water Bearer, focused on common good and community. Ready or not, the world is having a we moment.
In this period, thick with patterns and loaded with emotional trip-wires bringing us remembrances of times past, it is relevant to remember that life is circular; we do the same things over and over, find ourselves in relationships that echo others, repeat the same internal theme again and again. Some say we do it until we get it right; I think we repeat our patterns until we realize we've plumbed those depths and don't have to do it anymore.
That's the
hole-in-the-sidewalk theory that I've mentioned here before; we find ourselves in a seemingly impossible situation, and somehow struggle free from it; then we duplicate that same hole to fall into, again and again, each time finding it easier to release ourselves until finally, at long last, we can step away from the hole and walk across the street. That cannot happen until we've fully integrated the truth that we have a choice of what we experience.
Sometimes, we jump in those pattern holes willingly, especially as they become more recognizable; we do it because it's comfortable. We aren't truly threatened by outworn patterns, no matter how dysfunctional or difficult; it's the devil we know. But after a while, even if we've learned to navigate them to our benefit, they don't fulfill us; we instinctively think of ways to sabotage the situation to get out quickly. What doesn't work anymore simply won't do. Many of us are in those final days of old patterns and familiar energy loops, feeling our way instinctively forward toward release. For many of us, this is our moment of reflection and closure.
If you find yourself full of nervous tension, don't fret -- it's normal. Fear of the future is part of the human condition; or perhaps, eons of conditioning. Think how ridiculous it seems to be more afraid of the possibilities of life than of those painful, stifling patterns that we've outgrown. If we realize that life is about choice, then we can exercise our choice to either see life as frightening and dangerous or loaded with opportunity and excitement; and nothing succeeds like success.
We can get comfortable with change by setting out to make small changes every day, learn that breaking our comfort zone and habitual patterns will bring us the exhilaration of discovering new personal territory. The more confidence we gain in our ability, the less frightening our path, and the world, will seem to us.
The Republicans have spent thirty years convincing us that the world is dangerous, and lately it appears to have met those expectations. But when we lift our vibration, and our expectation, life most often comes up to meet it. We will put our faith in one definition of life, or the other. Perhaps our diminished expectations are part of those old experiences and patterns we're leaving behind. We are no longer the people that fell in those first habitual holes; we're ready to cross the street. If we stop for a moment, consider where we've been and how far we've come, perhaps we won't retreat back to what has been painfully familiar for so long.
8, the vibratory number informing us at this moment, is about power. Our power is hidden behind layers of junk we've put in place to protect ourselves. Much like the holes in the sidewalk, things that we allow to steal our power do so until we notice that we have a choice. One way we can work with this problem is to change our story.
You are the author of your life and your narrative; you are the person giving away information about yourself, believing it and consequently dictating how the world will treat you. If your story is dismal, your prospects bleak, your thoughts confused; change your story. Take it apart, bit by bit, and do a good rewrite because the story about who you are that you tell yourself is infinitely more important than the story you tell acquaintances.
When you change your story, you can change your morphic field. Don't worry, it's in the rulebook -- you get to rewrite your tale of love and adventure anytime you'd like. Everything that has happened in your life has been assigned meaning by none other than yourself; you are capable of rethinking the context, if not the content, of your personal story at any point. What you might have considered victimization years ago can clearly be interpreted as release or renewal or epiphany now.
We've come to that time when we need to name our past experiences accurately and define them rightly so that we can release them back into the unformed, allowing the clutter of old reasoning to fall away and the stuck energy to recycle. You are not that person anymore; you are ready to step into your authenticity and power.
I ran across an interesting web site while researching this essay; it's a blog dedicated to the art of storytelling, written by a folklorist and associate professor of history at a state university. The woman had attended some kind of educational seminar and
what she wrote seemed tailor-made for this time frame:
Three movements are intersecting on college campuses: understanding diversity, civic engagement and global perspectives.
The civic engagement/service learning movement needs to ‘break the silence'
in regards to language that disempowers, often with the best of intentions, ordinary people -- this was in reference to the image of professionals and college students identifying and solving problems FOR others. This theme recurs throughout the civic engagement literature and it reminds me of the concept of ‘shared authority' articulated by historian Michael Frisch in regards to oral history and that is applied to public history as well.
That entire passage resonates with we energy. Solving problems for others is an old paradigm proposition; shared authority is at the heart of the new one. Solving problems together, in respectful collaboration, must replace the old competitive model if we are to survive this new century. And as closely as I follow politics, I can still find no leader on the horizon except our enigmatic Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, who speaks to the wisdom of community activism and shared authority.
More, all the tit/tat accusations and campaigning news has become tedious and appears petty. This ancient process of competing personalities is taking a back seat to the energy that is informing this presidential race; it's not a candidate we're voting for: it's a
paradigm. We are still waiting for the 21st century we've all dreamed of and we instinctually know that our selection is going to define our ability to seize it.
We are in an extraordinary time period, being given all the assistance possible to climb out
of our holes of habit and pattern, recognize our self-imposed limitations and give them back to the universe; trusting that as we step out into new experience, the road will come up to meet us. We've become aware that a good rescue from our circumstances begins within us and depends on our willingness to begin that process, and launch
ourselves toward something new and productive. And we have a sense that the world is waiting for us to accomplish that task. Then we can cross the street, unencumbered at last from our tangled past, and be the people we came here to be.
As Obama, himself a Leo, has said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." He's taken heat for that statement from McCain's camp, being painted as egotistical and full of himself, yet I can think of no words more thrilling to those of us who have crossed the street from old patterns of being on this planet, in this nation, and are looking to take hands and be those very ones we're waiting for.
Maureen Dowd of The New York Times
wrote an op/ed attributing that phrase wrongly, and readers took it upon themselves to track down its origins. One of the earliest references cited was from poet
June Jordan, in her moving 80s offering,
Poem for South African Women. I will include just the last stanza; open the link for the entire poem. I can't think of a more apt description of this extraordinary moment in time.
And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:
we are the ones we have been waiting for.
