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Sep1

Meeting the Trickster, Part 1

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Meeting the Trickster, Part 1

So, the trickster visited me a couple weeks ago, which was during a monkey wave, naturally. : )

BTW… I follow this great calendar called the Keeping Time Calendar. I’ve mentioned it on this blog before, and basically it is a calendar that blends Western Astrology with modern archetypes and the Mayan time cycle, called the tzol-kin. I’ve been using it for a couple years now, and it’s amazingly spot on. Actually, a great way to learn more would be to check out my Interview with Stargazer Li.

Anyway… waves last 13 days, and this happened to be a monkey wave. Monkeys represent the playful trickster, and I certainly have been having a trickster adventure!

So, this was a Thursday evening. I was moving, was supposed to get the keys on Wednesday, and had to be out of the old apartment by Monday (or the Sheriff would come, blah). So, I picked up keys on Wednesday, but they were the wrong keys. Not only that, but at that same time, my van wouldn’t go into reverse so I ended up being temporarily stranded! Then, on Thursday, I swung by the landlord’s office to get the right keys (they knew I was coming) and they had left early for the day! I hadn’t been able to make it there sooner because of stranded vehicle situation, and as a result, I missed out on day 2 of the moving days I thought I was going to have! So, this left me with Friday and Sunday because Saturday I had a big all-day event I was co-hosting.

All day Wednesday and Thursday, I had tried to contain myself, and stay calm and centered. But, Thursday evening, my frustration boiled over and I started crying. I cried really, really hard. I was so frustrated that I had so little control over the situation (and especially after the events of the weeks before). I had thought a 5-day move would be perfect, because I could pack and unpack as I went, and adjust myself, Joy and Moxa pretty smoothly. But, things weren’t going at all like I had hoped, and I just couldn’t hold it in anymore.

Finally, after a very long and very hard cry, I calmed down and realized something. I recalled that I was in the monkey wave, and I realized that this was happening to help me learn how to let go of control. I realized that my desire to make things happen exactly in a certain way keeps me from being spontaneous in the way that I want to be.

I also realized that the reason I keep myself poor (somewhat unconsciously, but sometimes I seem to outright reject or sabatoge prosperity), is because the work of trying to survive in poverty keeps me distracted from having real encounters with life, and with people. I get scared that if I get too close to people, I will lose my autonomy, and I will have to hand my will over to them.

So, interestingly, if I can learn to be less rigid about wanting to control every encounter and situation I face, and if I can free myself up enough to accept prosperity so that I’m not struggling for basic survival, then I can learn to have a more trickster-playful energy myself, and I can learn to encounter life in a fun and spontaneous way. This is always something I’ve wanted to know how to do, but not known how, and at this time it is unfolding itself to me!

This story continues. More tomorrow!

Jun19

The Effect of “Calling the Earth Sacred”

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The Effect of “Calling the Earth Sacred”

Here’s a great article about what the oil spill teaches reflects about the consequences of our beliefs about the Earth. When we view the Earth as a machine, the article says, we do not plan well for things going wrong, because we expect predictability to be high. In fact, the Earth is a very complex system of systems, a big ecosystem with many smaller ecosystems within it, and it rarely is predictable. As the article states, “Calling the Earth ‘sacred’ is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. ”

Yep. That’s exactly it. A great example of how paradigms effect actions. That’s exactly the kind of thing I am interested in revealing in a lot of my work… how ways of looking at the world impact how we act in that world. That’s why all art has political consequences, because art (visual, music, film, etc) impacts the way we see the world. This is why artists should be culturally supported more than they are here, because that power is very real. This is also why it’s important that people develop visual and media literacy, to understand the messages that they are bombarded with, and have tools to create resilience around resisting messages that are toxic. Yes, when we think of the Earth as a predictable machine, we feel less hesitation to mess with it however we want to. What other messages lead us to irresponsible and destructive action?

Jun9

Connecting the Dots

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Connecting the Dots

I’m really seeing how everything is connected. Reading this speech helps me to see that what I’ve been seeing about the world is right.

Martin Luther King Jr. talked about how racism, poverty and militarism are connected. Click here to check out his speech.

Here’s an excerpt:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Wow. Yep. There we are, still. A revolution of values is what we need. The issues are a little different, partly because some time has passed, but it comes down to the same stuff. That’s why I’m so interested in blending the spiritual and the political… spirituality (for me) is all about realizing the interconnectedness of all life, and that kind of realization is what we need to happen on a global scale if we are going to survive. It’s not just one political issue or another, it’s everything, our whole value system that needs to be revamped!