Inspiration

What is fate!  Does it exist?  Do thoughts create a fate? Just how much control is there to plan the life we wish?  Does synchronicity rely on our point of view?  And if our point of view changes the outcome of an event, does that make the science of life more a form of divination? Is the placebo effect a true healing?  Do some of our desires and prayers not fit the soul we inhabit? Is it therefore fundamental to find the right suit to fit our form? How can we know which dreams are the ‘right dreams?’  Which are to be the magic of un-answered prayers? If we could enter life backward, with 20-20 hindsight, none of the above would be of concern.  But we have been asking some form of these questions since the beginning, and we still have no answers. This is scintillating in itself.  Perhaps the only important part of the equation is that we ask the questions, that we struggle with the whang of a world constantly re-bounding through unseen connective tissue.  If there is a living unity, a World Soul, the Anima Mundi of Plato, Pythagoras, Plotinus, Ficino and others, then our energy-syntax, our patterns, and grid have to affect others.  If a thought jiggles a tiny web, twanging another by synchronicity, then do we get the ‘perfect storm’? The birth of computers? women’s rights? Penicillin? Six inch platform heels and skinny jeans? Life remains a mystery tour, despite constant discovery and feedback. Just when we think we know, we are surprised again… how truly wonderful. What?  You didn’t think I was going to answer these questions?  No, for I am like you, an alchemical, archetypal Oroboros, (Uroboros,) twisting in winds of change, trying to find my tail, and swallow it so I might……

Celebrating the sublime conundrum of deaths’ burnished brilliance on The Day of The Dead, is satisfying.  We might be as leaves, flaming out in high-flying colors, lofted into winds for a last dance.  Is it not a death many of us would envy?  If we but un-clutch, releasing the branch, we will slide into home base, and snuggle in colorful piles with our friends, held at last by Mother Earth….Wow! Sign me up for that one. Reaching the end of any cycle and perceiving ourselves as incandescent beauty, is a major achievement.  All rotations, be it the seasons, a life span, a planetary circling bring a time of release and dying, otherwise we cannot begin again. But facing the end of any cycle brings sadness.  We recognizing change and aging.  It forces the psyche within, just as winter’s bone-life shoos the body inside.  Endings are where we hope to face our deepest fears and desires. Yes, we sit by fires, drinking blood red wine, but also consciously, or un-consciously, begin preparations for spring birth.  In order to do so we must shed old skins so that what is crying to be born has opportunity for breath. The Day of The Dead is the ground of heaven when we face ‘limits that need respect, and look at the limitations we must transcend.’ (Stephanie Austin)  The  Universe supports these inner and outer cycles with layers of helpful energies: Fall’s last hurrah is the territory of Scorpio’s frozen waters of death and rebirth, profound passion, and innate desires that take us to the bottom of issues. Though most of us do not celebrate the dead as our ancestors did, we yet have a celebration that holds space, so when we are ready to return to the richer life of spirit, old rituals lie……

The muchness of who we are is created from a dynamic dance born of the resonance of 10,000 polarities.  As these polarities flow and ebb, they teach the difficult steps required to execute this dance. When lucky enough, we then perform it with full heart and flying feet. The dance states that if we only look backward, moving forward is difficult. If we only waltz the light fantastic, gliding through dark shadow is arduous. If we only snap a leg up to hold it high, no matter how fabulous it looks, we have only an event, but no sequence. We don’t understand how we got there, or how to leave. We have no ‘prepositional moves.’  If we only dance duets with the prince, we have no idea if we can solo, or, far more difficult, fit in with the corps de ballet. Twirling and leaping faster and faster to make people clap louder and longer, we relinquish an ability to connect to our internal vibration. We fail to hear our true resonance, which is the sum of ALL parts; all steps, styles, and tones. In the outward highly excellent performance, not only do we have no balance, it becomes difficult, if not impossible to dance with others.  We can’t identify, or feel their resonance.  We have no sense of who they are because it has grown too difficult to dance with our own 10,000 polarities.  We grow one-dimensional. We partner poorly, if at all. The prince cannot prevail and hold us up. Yes, the steps seem more difficult, because we are driven to learn them faster, and everyone else is whirling by at such a speed that taking a deep breath before sailing off into a beautiful waltz, is the luxe of a by-gone era. But remember, this dance needs……

What sort of a ‘farmer’ have I been? Did I grow enough for a long winter? Which dreams died this year? What was born? What nutrients, provided by mistakes, failures, and mis-steps will help grow new seeds? We lie under in a night sky, tiny and supercilious until exposed to Luna’s enormous Light.  Her quivering, round, emotional body questions our smallness, begging a larger life of more connection and meaning.  The fall’s Harvest Moon provokes ancestor bones to move beyond the flat, daily drone to ask,  “What do those of us, who no longer work the land, actually harvest?”  What do I cultivate when I do not turn over soil, dig under stalk and chaff? Am I producing anything of substance, or sustenance? Our ancestors howled when standing under a Full Moon, allowing her magic to prepare them for cycles of death and re-birth. When our bodies are infused with that ancient tribal awareness, the light of Luna’a wisdom promotes timeless, archaic, immutable, archetypal memory that requires no word of praise, only inquiry, questing, and howling. Any harvest is an end, and a beginning, provoking cyclical questions from this life, as well as other times and places: Do I honor the courage and steadfastness that brought this crop to harvest? Did I refuse my own gifts along the way? Will I allow this year’s mistakes, and failures, despondency, and carelessness to become the mulch and manure for next year’s seed? What failed to harvest? Why? Do my fears interfere with talents to produce? How? What showered me with abundance? In what new, more powerful ways will I husband spring seed? Am I willing to share the abundance? What does that look like? With whom do I share? Who is my tribe? How have I transformed from this harvest? How, and……

Anymore, our days ask for the rational, the analytical, and heavy time management. To create balance, we must return to poetry and Yoga, dance, and song.  What we need most is mystery, and intimacy, nurturing and magic.  As technology takes over, and we are more and more indoctrinated into literalness, and linear thinking, parsing each hour into multitudinous tasks that are less and less satisfying, we turn with gratitude to any Practice that nurtures the inner life. We lift our voice in secret songs, and tread the light fantastic across the kitchen floor.  Return to Rumi: We are the mirror as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain and what cures pain. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours. Great poetry, great anything, does not have to ‘make sense.’ It speaks via symbolic power, not intellect. What gets fed is an abiding sense of wonder that has nothing to do with rational life. This is sedition of the highest order. That wow of recognition and response travels directly into layered mandalas of bone, muscle, mucous, mind, emotion, and spirit where soul waits. This spiral into the unknown is where heavenly, inexplicable treasures lead toward the imaginative act, where we ache to express more of who we are.  This scary vulnerability requires a touch of madness and willingness for chaos. It asks for time to be set aside when we are not producing, not being ‘excellent,’ when we are messy and incoherent.  When was the last time you allowed that? Technology tends to honor the fast lane and the literal, the linear and the tidy where language, and whatever other tools are used, gets the job done tout suite.  Not a bad thing.  But like anything,……

     The last rose relinquishes its tender pink light, Her sweetness over-come by first frost, The haphazard blow ending paradise, Life strewn carelessly upon the earth. Fall is too twisty, too full of defeat for pink…anything. We are devil-clad in reds and burning orange Colors that shimmer under early night shadow, Days of vibrant death. Hard for soft summer bodies not to sigh, Still dressed for night’s of sumptuous heat. Regret pulls us toward early-lit windows To unpack the eiderdown, covering rose-bud sheets.