Maybe you've see the e-card going around on Facebook: "Dick Clark died during the year we aren't going to have a New Years; well played Mayans, well played..."
Indeed, even poor John Cusack had to show us the way, Emmerich-style. What's it all about, ole 2012? Is this it? Are we going down? Apocalypse and doom? Or is that just what titillates and sells?
Have we perhaps missed the message. Is it "STOP" or might it just be "RESET" when the calendar rolls over to 12-21-2012?
I guess we'll see, but I keep sensing that there is a lesson in transcendence, not a punishment or finality coming. It's oft quoted from Tantra, the expression that "something must die in order for something else to be born."And, so, perhaps that is where we are at.
This has been a really interesting year, for me, and for a lot of my friends. I suppose, kinda like the way we reckon decades, when I say this year, I mean from September of last to present. Change, dishevel, confrontation, futility turning not into more determination but surrender, and a desire to shake off what has been. I see this time as a metamorphic time, not a final time.
Liken it to a transit station on a long travel. Travel is great, but it's arduous, it's confrontational, it's often times a little scary having to navigate or communicate to others who don't share your words. We see things, even our most mundane daily actions, differently when we know we are on a trip.
Right now, we're on a trip. However, the old world conveyance that we've been accustomed to and reliant on just isn't going to get us where we need to go. Do you sense that, spinning your wheels, running miles and gaining inches? Do you really want to hang onto that feeling? Don't you have that deep suspicion that things really could, and must be, much better, much different, maybe even more 'evolved' than they are?
If this is working for you, then sit tight. I don't doubt there are a lot of folks who don't want to think about it, or take responsibility for figuring out where they are or where they're going. Perhaps the better question is 'how is it going?' and from there, how can we co-create a better way. But, that takes 'getting on the bus!'
Now, on this trip, this year, we've hit the border; these are also weird places. Perhaps for many of you, you're accustomed to an easy border crossing or haven't had the experience. I've been blessed and travelled early, and wide; maybe I've been incautious, but I've also travelled in places where conflicts, wars and the occasional terrorist act was perpetrated.
When I was 15, I was in a mini van traveling through the Sinai from Israel to Egypt. This was just few months after Carter got Begin and Sadat to sign the accord. Tension, conflict and a tenuous new found peace were palpable. We drove for 14 hours, with a check point at the old battle front of the Israeli-Egyptian war. That's where they settled the border, so they just dumped us out in what could've been a refugee camp, 110+, no shade and about 600 people waiting to file through a tin shack. Armed Soldiers - the kind that actually had been in combat in the past year, bored and pissed, and then literally hundreds of miles of desert on each side of a barbed wire fence.
That was not comfortable, or pleasant, or easy - and it felt at times completely threatening and out of control. I was with my mother, sister and aunt, and it was quite unpleasant for them to be Anglo-American women in this environment, with the Soldier and the other travelers, mostly dis-enfranchised bedouins who really didn't understand how the desert got cut into two halves. Absolute lack of options pretty much forced surrender to the situation, and I live to tell the tale.
I'm working this up, because I think we've now, collectively as a conscious species, hit that border. We're a little stalled, we're uncomfortable and we don't know how to just get to the other side.
My guess is this - the other side requires a new kind of traveller. That traveller will be taking a new kind of conveyance that transcends the prior. And at this checkpoint, at this border, as we sit in this waiting area, waiting for them to call out "General Boarding for the New Era, Flight 2013, now boarding", we've got to be that traveller.
Travel light, don't think twice, we're leaving the shadows behind. And to complete the analogy... stop packing your bags. There isn't room for your baggage. Everything you want to pack and hold is a piece of that former land and time, and binds you to it. You wanna take this trip, and sit in first class... drop your baggage, even the carry on. Get full-empty and you might get fulfilled.
Are we dying? Of course! Hopefully slowly and elegantly - but we are. Is the world gonna end at the Winter Solstice - really, who knows!? But, I suspect not. I think for many of us who are waking up, if we don't do the work of unpacking our bags and getting ready to board, that we won't go anywhere, we'll miss the trip, we won't get to the promised land.
If we can learn from the caterpillar, who may not even have a clue that the butterfly is inside, but who responds to the call to lose the first identity to create the next, more beautiful, more mobile form, then we are served. There is a time in the chrysalis that must feel so tight, so restrictive, so final - but that is where surrender and patience yield the transformation.
Give thanks and praise, keep unpacking and dropping your baggage. When you get uncomfortable, know that is the barometer for change and growth and joy!
Take the trip - give thanks and praise, let's see what happens!
Indeed, even poor John Cusack had to show us the way, Emmerich-style. What's it all about, ole 2012? Is this it? Are we going down? Apocalypse and doom? Or is that just what titillates and sells?
Have we perhaps missed the message. Is it "STOP" or might it just be "RESET" when the calendar rolls over to 12-21-2012?
I guess we'll see, but I keep sensing that there is a lesson in transcendence, not a punishment or finality coming. It's oft quoted from Tantra, the expression that "something must die in order for something else to be born."And, so, perhaps that is where we are at.
This has been a really interesting year, for me, and for a lot of my friends. I suppose, kinda like the way we reckon decades, when I say this year, I mean from September of last to present. Change, dishevel, confrontation, futility turning not into more determination but surrender, and a desire to shake off what has been. I see this time as a metamorphic time, not a final time.
Liken it to a transit station on a long travel. Travel is great, but it's arduous, it's confrontational, it's often times a little scary having to navigate or communicate to others who don't share your words. We see things, even our most mundane daily actions, differently when we know we are on a trip.
Right now, we're on a trip. However, the old world conveyance that we've been accustomed to and reliant on just isn't going to get us where we need to go. Do you sense that, spinning your wheels, running miles and gaining inches? Do you really want to hang onto that feeling? Don't you have that deep suspicion that things really could, and must be, much better, much different, maybe even more 'evolved' than they are?
If this is working for you, then sit tight. I don't doubt there are a lot of folks who don't want to think about it, or take responsibility for figuring out where they are or where they're going. Perhaps the better question is 'how is it going?' and from there, how can we co-create a better way. But, that takes 'getting on the bus!'
Now, on this trip, this year, we've hit the border; these are also weird places. Perhaps for many of you, you're accustomed to an easy border crossing or haven't had the experience. I've been blessed and travelled early, and wide; maybe I've been incautious, but I've also travelled in places where conflicts, wars and the occasional terrorist act was perpetrated.
When I was 15, I was in a mini van traveling through the Sinai from Israel to Egypt. This was just few months after Carter got Begin and Sadat to sign the accord. Tension, conflict and a tenuous new found peace were palpable. We drove for 14 hours, with a check point at the old battle front of the Israeli-Egyptian war. That's where they settled the border, so they just dumped us out in what could've been a refugee camp, 110+, no shade and about 600 people waiting to file through a tin shack. Armed Soldiers - the kind that actually had been in combat in the past year, bored and pissed, and then literally hundreds of miles of desert on each side of a barbed wire fence.
That was not comfortable, or pleasant, or easy - and it felt at times completely threatening and out of control. I was with my mother, sister and aunt, and it was quite unpleasant for them to be Anglo-American women in this environment, with the Soldier and the other travelers, mostly dis-enfranchised bedouins who really didn't understand how the desert got cut into two halves. Absolute lack of options pretty much forced surrender to the situation, and I live to tell the tale.
I'm working this up, because I think we've now, collectively as a conscious species, hit that border. We're a little stalled, we're uncomfortable and we don't know how to just get to the other side.
My guess is this - the other side requires a new kind of traveller. That traveller will be taking a new kind of conveyance that transcends the prior. And at this checkpoint, at this border, as we sit in this waiting area, waiting for them to call out "General Boarding for the New Era, Flight 2013, now boarding", we've got to be that traveller.
Travel light, don't think twice, we're leaving the shadows behind. And to complete the analogy... stop packing your bags. There isn't room for your baggage. Everything you want to pack and hold is a piece of that former land and time, and binds you to it. You wanna take this trip, and sit in first class... drop your baggage, even the carry on. Get full-empty and you might get fulfilled.
Are we dying? Of course! Hopefully slowly and elegantly - but we are. Is the world gonna end at the Winter Solstice - really, who knows!? But, I suspect not. I think for many of us who are waking up, if we don't do the work of unpacking our bags and getting ready to board, that we won't go anywhere, we'll miss the trip, we won't get to the promised land.
If we can learn from the caterpillar, who may not even have a clue that the butterfly is inside, but who responds to the call to lose the first identity to create the next, more beautiful, more mobile form, then we are served. There is a time in the chrysalis that must feel so tight, so restrictive, so final - but that is where surrender and patience yield the transformation.
Give thanks and praise, keep unpacking and dropping your baggage. When you get uncomfortable, know that is the barometer for change and growth and joy!
Take the trip - give thanks and praise, let's see what happens!
